The Big Greedy Data Center Next Door
In 2021, Andrew and Stevi Groetsch started building a modern ranch-style home across from a peaceful stretch of farms in Vineland, New Jersey. One night a few years later, in September 2025, Andrew was reading their daughter a bedtime story when he noticed the windows in her room vibrating with a loud, mechanical hum. He heard the same “wailing” sound while walking their floppy-eared Hungarian pointer at dawn. “We’d just spent a bunch of money to build a house,” Andrew told me in the family’s spacious, tree-lined backyard. “We pay taxes—a lot of taxes. We were pretty mad at that point. Still are.”
The source of the noise was New Jersey’s largest data center, about a mile down the road from the Groetsches’ home. The facility is owned and operated by a company called DataOne for the Netherlands-based “neocloud” provider Nebius, which is responsible for sourcing, installing, and managing graphics processing units (i.e., specialized microchips) made by Nvidia. According to the terms of a five-year deal worth up to $19.4 billion, Nebius will deliver that computing capacity to Microsoft, whose internal teams will reportedly use it to create large language models and a consumer AI assistant. Giving Microsoft everything it wants will take at least 300 megawatts of power—nearly double the electrical generation capacity of the entire city of Vineland.
Vinelanders aren’t happy about it. They’re now ensnared in a bitter nationwide battle pitting a core engine of the U.S. economy against most of the people who live here. The market value of AI-related companies has grown by approximately $27 trillion since November 2022; by some estimates, AI-related investments now account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. GDP growth. This surge of investment and stock valuations has fueled a boom that is primarily benefiting the already rich: the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. households, which own 87 percent of stocks. It was thanks in part to these dynamics that U.S. billionaires added $1.5 trillion to their collective net worth in 2025. The same year, American workers took home their smallest share of GDP since 1947.
For the frontier labs, builders, cloud network operators, energy companies, and chipmakers (to name just a few interested parties) that are already cashing in on the AI spending binge, data centers really do appear to be the “LIQUID GOLD!” President Donald Trump has claimed they are. Most Americans, however, just don’t see the benefit of having them in their communities. A Heatmap Pro poll released in mid-August found that Democrats, Republicans, and independents all oppose by significant margins a center being built near where they live; three-quarters of Americans overall oppose nearby data center development. More than half of Americans support a nationwide moratorium.
These aren’t just idle gripes to pollsters fishing for discontent. According to Heatmap Pro, more than 500 counties or municipalities have blocked or restricted data center development. In the first three months of 2026, Data Center Watch reported that at least 75 projects worth an estimated $130 billion were disrupted by local opposition. In New Jersey—where 56 percent of voters support banning data center development near where they live—38 municipalities have done exactly that.
