Right off the highway in Trumbull, Conn. is a set of large, red brick buildings. They're a little bigger than a Walmart Supercenter, sitting on eight acres of land. This is the town’s data center.
It’s been around since the 1960s, and right now it’s in the middle of a major upgrade, one that will take it from regular computing to AI computing. Local residents, like Richard White, have some concerns.
“It could be a very large AI data center from a square footage point of view,” said White, who co-leads a group of concerned residents, known as the Trumbull AI Data Center Watch group.
“It’s currently small. We're okay with it remaining small, maybe, with the right regulatory environment. We don't want it to be bigger and we don't want more,” White said.
New England has dozens of small data centers like this, some of them decades old. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence, these facilities could get upgraded to handle AI computing. The changes can be hard to see from the outside and – for people who oppose them – even harder to stop.
Last month, Trumbull passed a 2-year moratorium on new data centers, but that won’t stop its existing data center from being converted for AI.
The process is known as retrofitting. Instead of building a new data center from scratch, old buildings and data centers get renovated so they can handle the power and cooling needs of the computer chips that make AI work.
“The original data centers that we've had for years in our country use CPUs. These are the core computing chips that are in all of our laptops,” said Kenneth Gillingham, professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale School of the Environment.
AI computing relies on a different kind of chip, known as a GPU, that can process a lot more data. They use two to three times more energy and get hotter than the older chips.
“So what they will do is they'll pull out the old CPUs and they'll put in a whole bunch of the GPUs, and really fully swap what's actually in the data centers themselves,” Gillingham said.
Some AI in all data centers
Some AI experts say finding ways to make older data centers capable of running at least some AI is the way of the future.
“I believe strongly that we are going to see a very hybrid approach to data center design,” said Bill Kleyman, co-founder and CEO of Apolo.us, an AI company.
He says the types of things that small data centers do, like handling our emails or storing our photos, won’t go away, but those data centers could start doing more.
“I believe that in the very near future, we're going to have enough pressure from clients that a facility – let's say it's a 40 megawatt facility – is going to have to figure out a way to put AI infrastructure into their environment and either that or risk losing the customer,” he said.
If older data centers want to work with higher education, research institutions or financial organizations, they’re going to need to put in at least some AI equipment, Kleyman said.
Room for expansion
In Trumbull, First Selectman Vicki Tesoro said the AI upgrade won’t increase the existing data center’s size, water usage, electrical needs or generate more noise. But the property has a lot of room for expansion and locals are nervous about what happens if the data center grows in the future.
“There is a ton of potential on this property,” White said. “With the high-density AI racks that they talk about placing in this facility, they would run out of money and they would run out of power way before they run out of square footage.”
On Wednesday, Trumbull residents asked the town's planning and zoning commission to consider a 1-year-moratorium that would, in part, prevent current data centers from increasing in capacity or intensity. But the commission rejected the measure, stating the language in the moratorium was vague, making it difficult to enforce.
Connecticut Public requested a copy of 365 Data Centers’ letter of intent for the Trumbull site to learn more about the AI upgrades. A representative from the company denied the request, stating the document is confidential and non-binding and that there is no timeframe for future public announcements.
Earlier this month, White and other residents went on a tour of the data center with executives from 365 Data Centers and Aphorio Carter, the two companies leading the AI upgrade.
Talking face-to-face with the executives gave Trumbull resident Sherry Boyd a “tiny bit of piece of mind, like maybe 3%,” she said.
“But without having something official in writing where they can be held accountable for what they’re doing, we’re not going to let up until we have that,” she said.
Sarah Beck, who also lives in Trumbull, is less optimistic about the likelihood of the two companies sticking to their promises in the future.
“From my perspective, we’re not dealing with people. We’re dealing with a corporation,” she said.
“And then when they go back on their word, they’ll say ‘Tough cookies. You don’t have regulations in place. We never agreed to these things’. Those are the assumptions that I’m working under,” she said.
With White, Boyd and Beck lead the Trumbull AI Data Center Watch group. What they and others want is a written guarantee that the Trumbull data center will stay within the limitations they’ve set out and not turn into a giant AI data center.
“One of our goals is we don't want Trumbull to become a cautionary tale to other towns in Connecticut and other towns in New England. ‘Don't let what happened in Trumbull happen to you’. We're hoping to avoid that,” White said.
Instead, they’re hoping Trumbull will become an example of how to ensure a growing data center doesn’t harm the community it’s in.
This story is part of Awaiting Data, a special series from the New England News Collaborative.
Áine Pennello is a Report for America corps member, covering the environment and climate change for Connecticut Public.
