By Audrey Gao

As artificial intelligence (AI) spreads into daily life, so do the buildings that make it possible. 

One of those buildings is DataOne in Vineland, New Jersey. It is currently under construction, set for completion and on track for delivery in December 2026. However, the center is facing backlash over issues such as excessive utility usage. 

Data centers are the industrial backbone of AI. They are facilities packed with servers that store, process and transfer the data behind everything from chatbots to cloud storage. Building one at this large scale means large amounts of electricity, large amounts of water for cooling and, increasingly, large amounts of local pushback. Around 80 data centers across at least 27 municipalities are either operational or soon will be across the state. 

Matt Williams, chairman of a grassroots nonprofit group called Sustain SJ (South Jersey), has spent the past year trying to get straight answers from DataOne, the data center sitting on a 109-acre plot in Cumberland County. 

In the summer of 2025, Williams heard people “talking and murmuring.” “I was a little upset about hearing news of the data center then,” he said. “It was being built at that time already.” 

Since then, the group has grown from a handful of residents in a diner to, by Williams’ count, close to 13,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook combined. “What the group looks like now looks a lot different than what it was then,” said Williams. “We met in a diner, and it was a group of residents, and we were honestly just kind of discussing and learning everything that we’ve learned about the development.”

Williams’ concerns start with the ground underneath the site. The city of Vineland draws its drinking water from the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer and the DataOne site sits inside a Wellhead Protected Area that shields it. “Any contamination that hits the ground is now our drinking water,” Williams said. 

His second concern is the facility’s power source. Reporting from WHYY shows that the plant is designed to generate 85 percent of its own energy on site, using natural gas piped in from an existing line, with the rest supplied by Vineland Municipal Utilities and Atlantic City Electric. Accounts of the facility’s total output varies: WHYY has described it as a 350-megawatt “hyperscale” facility while the New Jersey Globe reported construction of a 300-megawatt center. Either way, Williams said it dwarfs the city’s own municipal capacity.

DataOne, for its part, presents a different picture of the project. Its Linkedin page describes its technology as “designed to operate in harmony with local environmental and social ecosystems” with “net-zero consumption across water, energy, and air emissions.” DataOne’s CEO, Charles-Antoine Beyney, has made similar arguments to New Jersey reporters, comparing the facility’s emissions to “200 cows” or a “small logistic center from Amazon with 150 trucks” and calling the project “something that is not creating that much disturbance.” He has also said the center plans to pull moisture from the air using waste heat, drawing 20 million gallons a year without touching the aquifer. 

Williams said that kind of reassurance is exactly what Sustain SJ has struggled to get written in stone. “We asked them for two weeks straight, ‘How is the water treated, where is it discharged?’” he said. The response, he said, was never more specific than “we will follow all regulations.” “It’s not an answer in our opinion,” Williams said. “We need a more direct answer.”

He also pointed to a similar pattern in how the project’s power ambitions grew. Beyney told the New Jersey Globe, “The original plan for this AI factory was to build a 50-megawatt one and get the power from the grid. However, as the project got larger, so did our ambitions and we opted for a ‘behind the meter’ strategy, based on gas for a 300-plus megawatt infrastructure.” The sixfold jump from the original pitch is the abrupt pattern Williams said has defined the whole project. 

Sustain SJ has since built a coalition that includes the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, Food & Water Watch and the Pinelands Alliance, along with organizers in Marana, Arizona, who are fighting data centers in a similar capacity. 

Vineland’s planning board is expected to revisit DataOne’s approval on Aug. 5, 2026, the next test of whether a year of organizing changes the outcome. Williams is direct about what he thinks the fight has already accomplished, even if it doesn’t stop the project’s construction. 

“It would have been operational in a more disastrous way,” he said. “Now it’s just less disastrous.”