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A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC. Gothamist Listen Live Donate News Dozens of NJ towns are banning data centers. Can they survive legal challenge? By Mike Hayes Published Aug 5, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. ET
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Last month, a data center developer sued Andover Township, New Jersey, over local officials' move to ban the energy-hungry tech facilities just months after they planned to embrace one.
Mayor Tom Walsh doesn’t seem that worried about the legal fight.
“They’re asking to turn over our ordinance. We’re going to turn around and say this is what we did and why we did it,” he told Gothamist. “We feel very good about our position.”
Andover made headlines earlier this year after videos showing residents berating Walsh and the other members of the township committee went viral on social media. Their outrage was centered on town officials’ initial move to change zoning regulations at an industrial location in the Sussex County township so the property could be turned into a data center. Walsh said he was “naive” about how residents would react.
“If it creates that many people screaming, all the money in the world isn’t worth the divisiveness,” Walsh said.
Andover is one of many municipalities that have moved to ban data centers after public outcry. In communities across the state, locals have sounded alarms over the possibility of large energy and water demands, noise pollution from data centers running day and night and other environmental impacts.
To date, more than 25 Garden State municipalities have banned data centers. At least a dozen others have proposed ordinances to do so. So far, only Andover and Monroe Township in Gloucester County have faced lawsuits.
National Land Developers claims in its complaint that Andover Township’s reversal of its zoning permitting data centers is arbitrary and “does not constitute sound planning.” National Land Developers did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
The surge in local bans comes as state lawmakers reckon with steep hikes in residents’ utility costs that have happened in conjunction with the data center boom.
On average, New Jerseyans have paid about 22% more for electricity this year than the year before, amounting to an annual increase of nearly $400 per household, according to data from MIT and the climate news site Heatmap . That’s a higher spike than any other state in the country. Only Washington, D.C., saw larger increases in the last year.
”The fundamental challenge is that we are experiencing tremendous growth and demand for electricity. There are just more people who want to use more electricity — and most of them are AI data centers,” said Abe Silverman, an energy research scholar at Johns Hopkins University.
Gov, Mikie Sherrill ran on getting energy costs under control. But the first-term Democrat has not sought to run the AI industry out of the state. Last month, Sherrill signed legislation requiring large facilities to pay for their own energy needs and cover infrastructure upgrades to the grid, in an effort to prevent tech companies from shifting costs to consumers.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order in July placing a one-year pause on new large-scale data centers to allow state agencies to draft comprehensive regulations.
Matthew Hale, a political science professor at Seton Hall University, said that municipalities passing ordinances to ban data centers are on firm legal ground.
“[In New Jersey] there is a lot of local control. The Municipal Land Use Law, it has municipal right at the front of it, so it tends to govern pretty strongly,” Hale said.
How the data center ban lawsuit plays out in Andover could affect dozens of other municipalities enacting or considering data center bans.
“It’s cut and dry. We have a pretty good plan,” said Walsh, Andover’s mayor. “Could take six months, a year. Hopefully it’s shorter, so we can move on.”
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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