Kristin Tate is a Republican political strategist and contributor at Sky News. Her latest book is “The Liberal Invasion of Red State America.”
The battle over data centers in Massachusetts runs deeper than utility bills, water usage, or property rights. For many residents, these hulking facilities have become unwanted symbols of an artificial intelligence revolution they had no say in building. If Big Tech wants to plant that future in people’s backyards, towns shouldn’t just make room — they should extract something substantial in return.
Yes, people are worried about utilities like electricity and water. They are also worried about noise, transmission lines, trucks rumbling through town, green space being cleared, and enormous industrial buildings altering the look and feel of their neighborhoods. Those concerns are legitimate, and they should shape any deal a town makes with a developer.
But the backlash against these massive facilities cannot be remedied solely by responsible resource use or mitigating infrastructure concerns. Data centers carry a meaning that a warehouse or conventional office park does not. AI is already writing students’ schoolwork and eroding the entry-level jobs that once gave young people a foothold in the workforce. It’s cloning human voices and producing fake photographs and videos nearly impossible to distinguish from reality. AI programs are increasingly inserting themselves into interactions that once took place between students and teachers, and between patients and doctors.
The public has had no say over the speed of this technological upheaval. Now AI is taking physical form in places where people live: massive, largely windowless buildings packed with servers.
Local leaders do not necessarily need to ban data centers altogether. But if Big Tech wants to build these facilities in communities’ backyards, community leaders should recognize the leverage they have and name their terms.
Across Massachusetts, communities are already putting the brakes on data center development as they reconsider what they are willing to accept in return. Lowell imposed a moratorium on new data centers while it considers new zoning rules. Westfield enacted a one-year pause on additional projects following opposition to a proposed multibillion-dollar data center campus. In Newburyport, officials have raised questions about whether the city’s water supply can accommodate major new development while also meeting its housing obligations.
The Healey administration has recognized that towns deserve a greater say. A recent executive order requires large data centers to obtain local approval before certain state permits can move forward and calls for community-benefit agreements. The administration has also made clear that developers should bear the costs of the energy infrastructure their projects require rather than shifting them onto households and businesses. Those are important protections, but making Big Tech pay its own bills is not the same thing as compensating a municipality for hosting it. Local governments should be far more demanding about what they require in community-benefit agreements.
Unlike the factories of earlier generations, data centers have relatively little connection to the communities that host them. Factories employed generations of families whose workers bought homes, patronized local businesses, and became part of the social fabric. Data centers may bring billions in investment and construction jobs, but once built, their permanent workforces will be modest relative to their enormous footprints. The town supplies the land, power, and water; most of the economic benefit flows elsewhere.
The character and history of a community have value, even if they are difficult to quantify. People care about what they see from their backyards and what kind of development defines their surroundings. In Massachusetts, where local identities can stretch back centuries, those attachments are especially powerful.
A genuine community-benefit agreement should ensure that residents receive something meaningful in return for hosting a data center where they live. Municipalities could demand electricity credits or direct payments to nearby households to compensate them for the disruption of hosting the facility. Towns could also require companies to set aside permanent conservation land elsewhere in town, demand guarantees that nearby homeowners be compensated if the project reduces their property values, or ask for binding requirements that developers fully remove obsolete facilities at their own expense. The benefits should be tangible enough that the people living alongside the AI boom can see them.
Efforts by some communities are already showing how much local calls for compensation can yield. In Hazle Township, Pa., NorthPoint Development has offered $10,000 directly to every eligible household if its proposed data-center campus moves forward. The offer is part of a larger package that also includes $7 million a year for 15 years for township services, including a local police department and reduced trash fees, as well as $15 million that could fund workforce training, education, recreation, and youth programs. The proposal has not eliminated local opposition, but it demonstrates how much bargaining power communities have when developers need their approval.
For years, the term “cloud” made the digital world sound almost weightless, detached from the physical constraints of ordinary life. The AI boom has exposed just how misleading that image is, as the infrastructure behind it requires enormous amounts of land, electricity, and water, along with substations, roads, permits, and places willing to host it.
Big Tech needs something from Massachusetts towns. For perhaps the first time in the AI revolution, that gives ordinary communities real bargaining power.
They should use it.
