Can Data Centers Be Built and Operated Responsibly? Ask My Hometown

I grew up in Westfield, Massachusetts, at 342 Holyoke Road. In 2021, the City Council approved a $4 billion data center campus at 199 Servistar Industrial Way, on land that sits partly on wetlands and an aquifer, the region's drinking water source. The site is about 1.8 miles from my childhood house. The vote passed 9 to 3. Almost nobody objected.

By 2026, that had changed. Residents packed council chambers and won a one year moratorium on new data center projects. Lowell and Holyoke passed their own moratoriums. Governor Healey now requires limits on air and noise pollution, caps on water use, and proof that a project will not raise local electric rates.

The environmental cost of a data center comes down to five variables: how the IT equipment is cooled, how the facility rejects that heat outdoors, what powers it, where it sits, and how loud it runs. Air cooled servers run a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.5 to 1.8. Liquid and immersion cooling remove heat more efficiently at the chip, cutting PUE to 1.03 to 1.08. Immersion cooling by itself does not reduce water use, since that depends on a separate choice: whether the facility rejects heat through evaporative cooling towers or dry coolers. Dry coolers eliminate on-site water use entirely but can demand 10 to 35 percent more electricity than evaporative towers, more during heat waves.

Power source matters more than the cooling loop. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that 92.5 percent of a data center's water footprint comes from generating its electricity, not cooling its racks. A facility on hydro or nuclear power carries almost no water cost at the plant. The same facility on a coal or gas grid inherits that fuel's water cost.

Location decides much of the rest. Two thirds of data centers built since 2022 sit in water stressed regions, according to Bloomberg Intelligence and the Lincoln Institute. A campus in Iowa competing with farmland for water behaves nothing like one in Quebec, where hydropower and a cold climate do the work for free.

Noise is the variable nobody priced in early. Data centers run cooling equipment, chillers, cooling towers, and HVAC fans, continuously, since server floors need round the clock cooling. Diesel backup generators add to the noise only during monthly testing, typically 50 to 150 hours a year per unit, or an actual grid outage. Microsoft now faces a federal class action in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin over a persistent hum from its cooling systems, and residents in New Jersey and Ohio report the same problem. Much of it is low frequency infrasound that standard decibel meters and noise ordinances written for block parties were never built to catch.

Westfield's 2021 vote treated its data center as an economic decision. The 2026 moratorium treats it as an engineering one. The state's new certification standards will require the developer to disclose cooling method, power source, and noise mitigation plans before construction proceeds. Those disclosures, not the 2021 vote or the 2026 moratorium, will determine what actually gets built on the Barnes Aquifer.