August 3, 2026

By John Barrella

To be clear at the outset: to the best of my knowledge, no developer has proposed a data center in Middleborough.

No site has been identified, no company has approached the town, and nothing of the kind appears anywhere in the town’s current development pipeline, which is currently centered on the Campus 44 and Middleborough Park industrial projects. This isn’t a piece about a fight already underway here. It’s a piece about why Middleborough is right to make sure that fight never has to happen in the first place.

Across the country, the same story keeps repeating itself in towns that didn’t get ahead of it: officials get pitched on a data center, get excited about tax revenue and jobs, and residents find out only later what they actually signed up for — strained power grids, drained water tables, and electric bills that never come back down.

Middleborough’s Planning Board is, to its credit, already reviewing draft language that would prohibit high-intensity data centers before any of that ever has a chance to play out here. The question this piece asks is simple: given what’s happened elsewhere, why would the town do anything else?

The pattern is not subtle

In Prince William County, Virginia, Blackstone’s QTS spent years and untold millions defending what would have been the largest data center campus in the world — before a court voided the entire zoning approval over a defective newspaper legal notice. Years of fighting, undone by a paperwork failure that should never have happened in the first place if the approval process had been handled with real care.

In Edgecombe County, North Carolina, a proposed data center quietly disappeared this summer after residents pressed hard questions about water and power at a public board meeting. County officials later confirmed the developer had simply moved on to “friendlier communities” — a polite way of saying they’d rather build where nobody asks questions.

In Henderson County, Texas, a data center near Cedar Creek Lake was withdrawn after community backlash — a withdrawal significant enough that Texas Governor Greg Abbott publicly praised the company for doing “the right thing” and called for statewide standards to stop it from happening elsewhere in rural, under-regulated communities.

And in Cascade Locks, Oregon, opposition to a data center project didn’t stop at the withdrawal of the deal. Voters recalled two local officials who had approved it in the first place.

In Dundee Township, Michigan, developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure spent months pursuing a 750-acre AI data center on farmland outside the village — until more than 100 residents packed a special township board meeting to object, citing water costs, noise, and a lack of transparency about how many meetings had already taken place behind closed doors. Both Dundee Village and neighboring Milan Township voted against the development agreements the project needed, cutting it off from public water and sewer service. Cloverleaf ultimately withdrew, acknowledging it “should have done more public communication and listening” before moving forward. The village’s own board president put it more bluntly to a local TV station: residents “stopped me and told me that they do not want it,” he said, adding that the information he’d been given about the project beforehand had been “95 percent wrong.”

These aren’t isolated incidents. By the industry tracking group Data Center Watch’s count, roughly $64 billion in data center projects have been blocked or delayed nationwide amid local opposition, and more than 800 community groups are now actively fighting some 1,500 planned facilities across 49 states. A Gallup poll this spring found 71 percent of Americans oppose having a data center built in their own community — a higher opposition rate than Americans report for nuclear power plants.

The infrastructure strain is not theoretical

The core resident complaint in every one of these fights is the same: data centers draw staggering amounts of electricity and water, and somebody has to pay for the infrastructure to support that — usually, it turns out, the ratepayers who never asked for a data center in the first place.

A Virginia resident profiled by Consumer Reports watched his monthly electric bill jump from roughly $100 to $281 in a single month. Researchers at NC State project that data center and cryptocurrency demand could push electricity costs up by as much as 57 percent in parts of the country by 2030. A separate 2024 study found that without major new investment in power generation and transmission, data center growth alone could drive Virginia’s electricity rates up 70 percent over the next decade. And PJM Interconnection — the regional grid operator serving Massachusetts and a dozen other states — has posted record-high capacity prices three years running, with its own market monitor attributing $13 billion in new ratepayer costs in the first quarter of 2026 alone to data center load growth.

Some states have begun forcing data center operators to cover their own infrastructure costs through specialized “large-load” utility tariffs, rather than spreading the bill across every household on the grid. As of this summer, 24 states had adopted at least one such tariff. Massachusetts is not yet among them. Absent that kind of protection, the default remains the same one residents in Virginia, Texas, and North Carolina have already learned the hard way: the town gets the strain, and everyone shares the bill.

Why this isn’t hypothetical for Middleborough

None of this is abstract for Middleborough, even without a data center on the table. Residents are already living through a comparable fight over the proposed Schobel Farm surf park, a project that drew a packed and skeptical crowd to a June Select Board informational meeting over concerns about traffic, noise, and water use for a single recreational development. Multiply those concerns by the scale of a data center — with power and water demands measured in megawatts and hundreds of thousands of gallons a day rather than a swimming lagoon — and it is not hard to see where this goes if the town doesn’t have rules already in place before a proposal ever arrives.

That is the exact risk a data center deal poses on a larger scale: a complex, technical proposal, negotiated in rooms most residents never see, whose true long-term costs to the town often don’t become clear until the contracts are signed and the water bills start arriving. A town already navigating one contentious, resource-intensive development fight has every reason to make sure it isn’t blindsided by a second, larger one.

What residents should ask for

None of this means Middleborough should slam the door on economic development. It means the town should insist on the basics that other communities learned to demand only after it was too late: independent, third-party analysis of water and power impact before any agreement is signed; a large-load tariff structure that makes any future data center operator — not existing ratepayers — cover the infrastructure costs its presence requires; and real public hearings, held early enough in the process that residents can actually shape the outcome rather than simply react to it.

Middleborough’s Planning Board is, to its credit, already reviewing a draft article to prohibit high-intensity data centers before any specific proposal ever arrives. Given what residents have already learned from the surf park fight, and what other towns wish they had asked before it was too late, that caution looks less like an overreaction and more like Middleborough finally doing its homework on time.

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This is an opinion piece. The author is a former chair and current Middleborough Finance Committee member.