NORTHAMPTON — As the proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers sparks controversy across the region, the city will hold a public hearing to help determine whether to implement a year-long moratorium on data center construction.
City councilors discussed a proposed ordinance aiming to block the creation of data centers for a year and create a joint mayoral-council committee to study, and possibly regulate, the facilities. On Thursday, the council referred the ordinance to the Committee on Legislative Matters and the Planning Board, which are expected to hold a joint committee meeting.
“I personally feel a knee-jerk reaction against data centers and AI, but I also feel like it’s our responsibility to get more information and study this better. There seems to be a lot of anxiety in the city, and I understand that, but I feel like we need to look at this,” said Ward 3 City Councilor Laurie Loisel, one of the ordinance’s co-sponsors. “The moratorium, I hope, will help take the heat off and just let us look at it with some measure of dispassion, so that we can get the information we need to make the decisions that we need to make.”
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 center 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 by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Proposed municipal action to block data center construction for a year comes as Easthampton and Greenfield are both considering temporary moratoriums on data centers, a measure that Westfield has already approved. Meanwhile, Shutesbury and Holyoke have banned such developments in their communities.
Ward 6 City Councilor Christopher Stratton, discussing the proposed ordinance, argued that the moratorium should apply only to data centers of a specific size and scale. He referenced a data center proposal in Westfield that, if approved, would have used 274 megawatts, which he described as being at least three times the city’s total energy usage.
“If you do a web search, log into Facebook, watch Netflix, pay a bill online, benefit from a weather report, or at this point, technically even make a phone call, you’re using something that the current language of this [ordinance] would actually consider to be a data center,” Stratton said. “I would like to see us, even in our moratorium, try to draw a distinction between someone who’s doing data as a business offering … versus an existing business of another nature that needs data services.”
Ward 1 Councilor Gwen Nabad, another co-sponsor of the proposed ordinance, suggested that with data centers emerging throughout the country, there exists a sense of urgency to pass a moratorium and prevent such projects from moving into Northampton “under the radar,” before the city has a chance to study their impact.
“What’s been happening in a lot of cities and towns across the nation is some of these small businesses come in as LLCs [and] they kind of get under the radar,” Nabad said. “Once it starts, it has the potential to just sort of blow up.”
The proposal is expected to come back to the full council at its Sept. 17 meeting. The Committee on Legislative Matters meets on Sept. 14, though it’s unclear if the data center moratorium public hearing will be on that agenda.
