NORTHAMPTON — With unanimous recommendations from the Planning Board and the council’s Committee on Legislative Matters, the City Council Thursday will take up a proposed yearlong moratorium on commercial data centers.
The council formed a committee last month to study data centers’ potential impact on their host communities — a topic that arose as the proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers sparks concerns across the region, prompting municipalities such as Greenfield, Easthampton and Westfield to enact moratoriums. Meanwhile, Shutesbury and Holyoke have banned such developments.
Environmental experts and researchers frequently point to data centers’ potential to use large amounts of energy, pollute nearby waterways, and release substantial heat, making the facilities a target of controversy in areas where they have been proposed.
For instance, large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water in a single day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute — a volume equivalent to the daily water usage of a town populated of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
At the Oct. 29 public comment portion of a joint hearing of the Planning Board and the Legislative Matters Committee, members of the public, such as Smith College student Scarlet Labbé-Watson, came out to speak in support of the moratorium.
Referencing the emergence of “forever chemicals,” known as PFAS, left behind by former industrial sites across her home state of Maine as an example of how shortsighted decision-making can lead to long-term pollution, Labbé-Watson asked city officials what harm a moratorium could have on the city, compared to the potential long-term harm data centers could impose.
“What would we be destroying if we put a moratorium within the bounds of Northampton?” Labbé-Watson asked. “Would we be interfering with old buildings that could potentially be repurposed for low-income housing? What would we be destroying to put a data center in and also what kind of harm would that open us up to long term?”
Resident Zain Salim said environmental impacts were a secondary concern for him. He said he was more worried that the large amounts of data stored at these centers could be used for corporate or government surveillance.
Salim argued that AI models that operate on the cloud, rather than on individuals’ devices, would allow large tech companies to surveil individuals’ use of AI.
“What data centers do is they allow large amounts of data to be stored in one place, and that’s primarily something that large corporations such as Google or Microsoft would want to do in order to, for example, surveil user queries of AI agents,” Salim said. “They will have AI models that can only be run on the cloud, not locally on people’s devices … that allows these companies to surveil user interactions with AI — that’s what I’m against, that’s what everyone should be against.”
Planning Board and the Committee on Legislative Matters members generally supported the moratorium, but deliberated over whether to implement size or electricity usage limitations.
Ward 3 City Councilor Laurie Loisel voiced concerns that overly specific language within the ordinance might inadvertently create loopholes for potential data center applicants.
“Sometimes when you define something more specifically then people think ‘well, it’s not that so I get to do it,'” Loisel said. “That’s my hesitation — accidentally using a definition that then gives people a reason to say ‘well, it’s not that so let me do it.'”
Ward 6 City Councilor Christopher Stratton said he would prefer to set a minimum size or electricity use in the ordinance’s definition of a data center, so the moratorium does not block less harmful businesses from coming to the city.
Stratton referenced South Hadley’s stalled effort to produce a data center moratorium as being an outcome he wished to avoid in Northampton, adding that he hoped the council could pass a moratorium that clearly defined what kinds of data centers it would temporarily ban.
“I would like to get a moratorium in. I would like it to be a moratorium that I can feel good about. Easthampton wrote their [moratorium] in terms of square feet … maybe that’s a more intuitively familiar unit,” Stratton said. “I was at a 500-kilowatt [energy use limit], today I’m at a 250-kilowatt [limit]. I like laws and regulations that establish a clarity of expectation.”
The two bodies ultimately decided to refer debate over whether to allow smaller, or less energy-consuming, data centers to City Council, which will further discuss the ordinance at its Thursday meeting.
