Cumberland County residents push back on Vineland data center plans

Electric bills, water use and a promised wave of jobs collided at the Landis Theater in Vineland, where more than 100 Cumberland County residents pressed DataOne over plans for an AI data center campus. Company CEO Charles-Antoine Beyney told the crowd the project would use a closed-loop water system, cover its own power costs and avoid raising local electric bills, while also saying it would meet New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection noise standards.

For many in the room, those assurances did little to calm fears that the burden would land on nearby neighborhoods instead of on the company. Yuleza Negron said she did not trust DataOne’s promises and worried the project would hit a low-income community hardest. Anthony Williams said the proposal’s food donations and jobs gave him some hope, but residents still focused on whether the campus would change daily life in Vineland through traffic, noise, water demand and the strain of a large industrial site near homes.

The backlash has spread well beyond one meeting. Cumberland County officials took the first legal step toward a possible moratorium on data centers on May 20, the same day Millville voted to ban them within city limits. Millville’s action blocked a proposed 2.6 million-square-foot facility that was projected to draw 1.4 gigawatts of power and use billions of gallons of water each year for cooling, a scale that has sharpened concern across South Jersey.

The Vineland project has also already drawn legal scrutiny over sound. Two neighbors filed a lawsuit over the humming noise from the facility, adding to complaints that the plant could disrupt quality of life and nearby property values. That local frustration is now feeding a broader state fight over whether data centers can grow without shifting the costs to ratepayers and surrounding communities.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill entered that debate on May 27 with a statewide plan that would require large data centers to report energy and water use every six months and help pay for grid upgrades. Her office said PJM reported data centers accounted for 70% of projected demand growth last year, and Sherrill said newer facilities can consume as much as 300 megawatts of electricity. In Cumberland County, where residents are already fighting over land use, utility costs and neighborhood impacts, the Vineland proposal has become a test case for how much AI growth the region is willing to absorb.