Holyoke became the first Massachusetts municipality to ban large-scale AI data centers Tuesday night, as the City Council voted 9-4 to prohibit any development exceeding 12 megawatts. The vote arrived after weeks of organized opposition from residents who packed council chambers, many voicing concern over water use, noise, and the potential downstream impact on the Connecticut River.
The ban does not affect the existing Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center on Bigelow Street, an academic supercomputing facility that has operated since 2012. It also leaves open the question of whether the developer behind a proposed 20-megawatt facility at 100 Water St. can reshape its plans to fit within the new limits.
Council President Tessa Murphy-Romboletti joined councilors Howard Greaney, Michael Sullivan, and Linda Vacon in opposing the measure. Murphy-Romboletti said the council's decision does not require ratification by the state attorney general's office. The mayor can veto the ban, she added, though "the council can vote to override the veto."
The developer's response
Ben Marshall, co-managing director with Chestnut River Power and Infrastructure, said his firm is still reviewing the council's decision. "We remain committed to finding a path for a project that works for Holyoke, and we're grateful to everyone who engaged in this process - the council and residents alike," he said. "We'll have more to share soon."
Chestnut River had not yet filed permits or purchased the property, a vacant industrial complex in the Flats that last housed marijuana cultivation. The planned adaptive reuse of the former mill would not require ground-up construction. The facility would draw power from Holyoke Gas & Electric under a dedicated service agreement structured so the project pays its full consumption cost, with no impact on other customers' bills, according to Marshall.
Water use has been a central point of contention. An early estimate pegged daily cooling needs at roughly 250,000 gallons. Marshall called that figure preliminary, not final, and said Holyoke Water Works indicated the municipal system can accommodate substantial additional capacity beyond that level. The developer also pointed to $2 million in annual property tax revenue and construction work tied to a $200 million project.
Resident opposition and council debate
The coalition against the data center formed quickly after the proposal surfaced, drawing dozens of protesters to previous meetings. Arianna Ketchakev, a robotics engineer who grew up in Holyoke, stood outside City Hall last week with others holding a "Ban Data Centers" sign. "I think that they are taking advantage of lower-income and marginalized communities, especially in a city where a lot of people's first language is not English," she said. "They are trying to advocate for this on the pillar of it's going to bring jobs, when in reality, it's going to destroy our water sources, it's going to cause noise pollution, it's going to cause air pollution, and it's going to impact every single town south of this because of the Connecticut River."
Councilors who supported the ban, most notably Israel Rivera and Anne Thalheimer, rejected a two-year moratorium that had been discussed during an Ordinance Committee meeting. Thalheimer pointed to the chamber's "Makers of Law, Makers of History" sign and said, "We have the ability to make history." Rivera said he was fighting for the concerns of residents in the Flats neighborhood.
Councilor Sullivan drew boos from protesters when he said during the committee meeting that the data center would not affect Holyoke's water supply "at all." Vacon argued the council needed more information before enacting a ban. Murphy-Romboletti wrote on Facebook that she had "strong reservations about passing a permanent ban on any industry without a defined timeframe and a commitment to doing the work necessary to develop thoughtful regulations."
Mayor Joshua Garcia did not respond to requests for comment after the vote, but had posted on Facebook on June 3. He described the proposed project as "fundamentally different" from larger gigawatt-scale proposals elsewhere. "At just 21 MW, this is a small, right-sized facility, comparable to the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center that has operated responsibly in Holyoke since 2012 without negatively impacting our water or electric supply," he wrote. "It is nothing like the massive gigawatt-scale projects proposed by billionaire developers elsewhere."
Why this matters for IT and development professionals
The vote signals that siting decisions for compute infrastructure are moving from the planning office to the ballot box in some communities. Holyoke's ban follows a near-total prohibition adopted in Mansfield in May and a one-year moratorium enacted in Lowell in March. For teams scouting colocation or edge capacity, the regulatory patchwork means site selection now requires a political risk layer that didn't exist a year ago. A 12-megawatt hard cap effectively excludes most commercial inference clusters, leaving only smaller, specialized deployments viable under local law. Developers and architects working on data center projects will need to factor community sentiment and water-use transparency into early-stage planning in ways that go well beyond standard permitting checklists.
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