VINELAND, NJ – The privacy of a small estate on the edge of a placid South Jersey forest is what Scott Montgomery longed for when he bought a sturdy new colonial 18 years ago, as a peaceful place for him and his wife to raise their three children.
But the world of Montgomery, a 59-year-old federal consumer protection official, changed last summer. That’s when his son started complaining about the constant noise like helicopters returning. He learned that the area near his yard was not turning into a 9-hole golf course, as the neighbors had been told, but a huge data center. It will eventually be powered by a bank of 35 gas turbines to accommodate routers designed to Microsoft’s artificial intelligence, or AI, is working fast, with a $17 billion contract.
Today, with the planned dataOne 300-megawatt plant slowly but mostly under construction, Montgomery has become an unexpected viral star on Instagram by posting videos of the beautiful sound that – from time to time, but for hours – emanates from this area, often at night.
“You hear that noise that goes on for hours, and it disturbs your sleep,” Montgomery told me Wednesday afternoon, as the earth’s crust was sometimes visible behind his three-acre tract. Neighbors were quiet at the time, but Montgomery shared a new video from that morning of the constant sound. Not knowing when the noise will come and go has raised anger.
“There’s a poor lady who lives closer – I’ve seen her on the news,” Montgomery said. “He said it gave him anxiety.”
Residents of the southern border of this South Jersey city are at a crossroads while others feel very anxious because of the sudden and unexpected activity in data centers – the invisible rooms of AI boom tools that are already rapidly changing the way we work (or don’t work), learn (or don’t learn), and live.
Power-hungry data centers across New Jersey are being blamed for rising electricity bills, and now a new generation of mega-structures like Vineland’s are raising more environmental concerns than noise complaints. The buzz here in South Jersey is similar to that of Pennsylvania, where a depleted natural gas supply and pro-business politicians have put the Keystone State on the upswing, with 50 projects in the works.
I visited Vineland on a day when many other tragic things were happening in the world, as an increasingly unpopular president struggled in vague language to justify his deadly war on Iran, and the United States Supreme Court was hearing his government’s appeal to depatriate millions of immigrants. However, I think that future generations will look back – if their minds are not greatly enhanced by the robot society – on the ways in which the AI revolution enhances our daily lives as the most important thing in the 2020s.
That’s already happening in Vineland, where a growing number of residents feel like canaries in the coal mine of the 21st century, on a knife edge between an unpredictable life in what was mostly farmland a few generations ago and now the bad vibes of the computer age.
Cumberland County is not a large geographic area. Donald Trump narrowly won it in 2024. But the data center is building a coalition of unlikely activists like Mike Gentile, a 62-year-old retired highway construction worker who lives on an eight-acre tract on Pennsylvania Avenue, less than a mile from the DataOne site.
“If you’ve ever been to the airport, you hear that noise all the time,” the Foreigner told me as we sat on his front porch, and I asked him to describe the intermittent sounds, which he likens to that of running generators—even though, like some of his neighbors, he has little insight into what’s really going on there.
Officials with DataOne have said that any sounds coming from the site are only the result of recent construction – the data center must be fully completed by the end of the year – and do not violate any noise laws. They insist that noise pollution will not be an issue once it is fully built.
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The company’s CEO, Charles-Antoine Beyney, came to Vineland to reassure residents that, as a child who grew up on a vineyard in the French countryside, he understands their concerns. He said his firm’s data center is designed to avoid the kind of complaints leveled against the first wave, with on-site generators providing 85% of the power needed and a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water. He says the company bought the closest homes to house some of its estimated 200 full-time employees, and that Vineland will benefit from an influx of tax dollars — after a five-year decline, that is.
A growing number of local residents are not buying.
More than 100 people showed up to protest against the data center in late March, and DataOne recently asked to postpone a Vineland planning commission meeting about the second phase of the project. Supporters like Montgomery hope to at least limit any future pollution, although it is too late to stop the project. One completed, the 130,000-square-foot building already has three data rooms in operation for the Nebius Group, a Netherlands-based firm that operates the site and sells data capabilities to Microsoft.
The Vineland Environmental Commission recently sent a letter to the planning board outlining its concerns about the information center, noting that its conservation plans are “experimental” and asking for strong assurances that it will not harm the city’s water supply. Residents are also worried that the natural gas pipeline – and a large storage tank on site – could be at risk, or even a terrorist attack.
“It’s a bomb,” Molichaba said of the 60-meter long gas storage tank awaiting action from the planning commission.
Vineland activists aren’t the only ones raising concerns about the constant and mysterious noise coming from the data centers. Many residents of northern Virginia, which is currently home to the nation’s largest data center complex, have also complained of constant humming and low-level vibrations.
Complaints of noise pollution should also be an alarm siren for Pennsylvania, where technology companies and developers are looking for big growth in places like the small town of Archbald, outside Scranton. There, residents feel bombarded by five different planned data centers, including a couple that will be among the largest in the world.
Public opposition may change the situation slightly. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is seeking re-election among the White House’s ambitions, moved from unbridled expansion to more caution in his latest budget speech, saying the state won’t accept new data centers that waste electricity supplies. Shapiro knows how to count votes; a recent survey found that 68% of Pennsylvanians do not want a data center in their community.
There is no doubt that there is a lot more noise than the low hum from a large server farm. When we talk to people like Gentiles and Montgomery – middle-aged men of good manners – no one can understand that data centers are a big symbol of a brave new world that is being forced on the middle class society, ready or not.
Both men grumbled, separately, about the same chaos caused by Trump’s ongoing election war in Iran, as the only thing crazy in a world where nothing makes sense. It was one thing to see a fancy farm just past Vineland being swallowed up by new subdivisions and endless truck traffic, but a new data center feels like something else — there’s something seriously wrong with them.
The dystopian present reminds Gen Xer Montgomery of 1984 – not George Orwell’s book, but the actual year when he was a teenager, seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger at the beginning. Terminator movie. “If you remember that movie, machines took over the world,” he said.
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