By Michael Suman

On the south side of Vineland, New Jersey, the skeleton of a building rises over the aquifer that the city’s 61,000 residents drink from. When it’s finished, it will demand up to 350 megawatts of power. The city that surrounds it has a capacity of 133. 

Once the site of ballfields and a nine-hole golf course, the land was leveled for the construction of DataOne, a 2.6-million-square-foot A.I. data center campus backed by the Amsterdam-based Nebius Group under a $17.4 billion contract to supply computing power to Microsoft. The center is approved, but the conversation is far from over. Vineland resident Matt Williams is working to shut it down. 

One year ago, Williams wouldn’t have known where to start. The chair of Sustain South Jersey, an organization dedicated to responsible development, accountability in local government and environmental stewardship, Williams had previously never read a municipal agenda. Now, he refreshes the Vineland City Council website every morning.

When Williams and his neighbors first saw the construction site, some of them mistook it for a new golf clubhouse. “At one point, it was a golf course that had one event on the property, and then they just leveled it and started building this thing,” Williams said. “They thought it was the start of a clubhouse or something.”

It was not a clubhouse. It was a hyperscale data center, sited on a wellhead protection area above the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, the groundwater Vineland drinks. “It’s our groundwater. It’s our drinking water,” Williams said. Anything that reaches the ground there, he argues, reaches the water. 

When he and his neighbors brought their questions to a city council meeting in November 2025, they were told they were too late and that they did not understand how government worked. 

In one narrow sense, the council was right. The planning board had signed off on the campus more than a year earlier, and steel was already going up. The group learned the hard way that an agenda item posted one day could disappear the next. 

In December, an item surfaced that was not an approval of anything. It was a $6.2 million loan from the city to the developer, drawn from Vineland’s Urban Enterprise Zone revolving fund to help pay for two cranes that were already standing on the lot. The vote, first set for December 9, was postponed to December 23. 

The delay was meant to cool things off. It did the opposite. “That just gave us two more weeks to get more people,” Williams said. On December 23, the chamber hit fire capacity. The council approved the loan anyway. (The loan offer was later rescinded.)

As time went on, Williams learned just how much the city had invested in the project. More items followed on the agendas: requests for tax abatements, permits, and underneath all of it, the redevelopment overlay that had made the site possible in the first place. 

The overlay, Williams said, let the developer avoid Vineland’s zoning map, clearing a 2.6-million-square-foot campus without the scrutiny that a heavy-industrial site would ordinarily draw. Williams thinks a data center belongs in heavy industry and only as a conditional use, “so people don’t feel like they’re caught off guard.” 

Exhausted by his dealings with the Vineland City Council, Williams turned to other elected officials for help. He emailed Congressman Jeff Van Drew, who had helped stop offshore wind turbines when residents objected. He tried the state legislature and his own mayor as well. 

What he wanted from them was simple: answers about the water.

Last October, the project’s engineers filed a plan to draw up to two million gallons of water a day. Pressed, the developer called it a worst case scenario and said that water would be recycled. New Jersey is under a statewide drought warning. 

DataOne was scheduled to be interviewed for this article but withdrew two days beforehand and declined to comment.

Williams’ work has come at a personal cost. At the same time he was challenging the data center, he was laid off. He knows that he has given his all to a fight he may not win. “It’s a difficult job,” he said. “Weighing the balance of my sense of justice and my sense of responsibility.”

The building stands today, mostly finished, on the south side of town, and the city still hasn’t cast its final vote. A planning board meeting is set for August 5. 

Williams puts his odds at one percent. It’s still higher than zero.