Every boom has its ghost town, and in western Massachusetts, ours is a data center that never got built. John Gehrhardson wrote in The Shoestring about this story back in 2024.
A few years ago, Westfield was promised one of the largest data centers in the state, a hyperscale campus that would turn scrubby land near the airport into a $4 billion temple to the cloud. Servistar Realties showed glossy renderings, the city approved a 40‑year tax deal, and local officials talked about hundreds of jobs and a bright digital future. The proposed buildings were massive, very tall, and ominous, looking like something from outer space.
Then the mail came back “refused,” the company stopped returning calls, and by 2024, Servistar had been administratively dissolved. No environmental permits, no shovels, no jobs. Just a quiet field and a loud lesson.
Westfield did everything the playbook says to do. The council approved the project in 2021. They lined up a generous payment‑in‑lieu‑of‑taxes agreement. They banked on an Eversource transmission interconnect and a new substation to feed the beast. The developers talked about ten buildings, 2.7 million square feet, and a power demand bigger than anything the region had ever seen. Then, as residents started asking hard questions about water, noise, and whether AI would actually need all those workers, the momentum stalled and never came back.
To me, Westfield is not just a local planning fiasco. It is a preview of what happens when the onrushing force of AI meets the physical world. We talk about “the cloud” like it is weightless, but it lands in very real places, on very real grids, and in towns that have to live with the consequences long after the ribbon‑cutting photos disappear.
If Westfield had built that data center, the hardware inside would already be halfway to obsolescence, the town would still be on the hook for power, water, and tax subsidies
The developer could walk away after a refresh cycle, leaving the town with a stranded asset. The U.S. is building data centers faster than any other industrial infrastructure, yet we don’t even track how many have already become obsolete.
Here’s the part they rarely say out loud: the computers inside these giant boxes will be obsolete in 10 years. AI chips evolve faster than any other hardware on Earth. A data center built in 2026 will need a full gut‑and‑replace cycle by the mid‑2030s. These aren’t monuments. They’re disposable.
Which raises the question: why are we spending so much public money to subsidize them?
Big Tech’s capital expenditures — CAPEX, the polite term — are now so large they distort the national economy. Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion this year on data centers and AI infrastructure. Amazon’s AWS division will spend $200 billion in 2026. Google plans to lay out $175 billion. Microsoft, $190 billion. Add it up, and you get more than $730 billion a year, much of it on facilities that will age like milk. But investment bankers love seeing giant CAPEX; they reward these companies for spending like drunken sailors.
In Utah last month, citizens watched as Box Elder County officials gave the green light to a data center that will use more electricity than the entire state, and now more than 4,000 citizens paid $15 to oppose the plan. More resistance is guaranteed as details emerge about Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary’s grand plan called Stratos-MIDA Data Center. This is just the start of a massive push back from the public on these ridiculous proposals.
Now imagine what even one‑third of that money — $243 billion — could buy if it weren’t being poured into server farms.
Instead, we’re getting data centers — energy‑hungry, water‑hungry, land‑hungry facilities that often receive massive tax breaks from the very communities that will bear the environmental cost. Data centers require millions of gallons of water a day for cooling. They strain local grids. They create almost no permanent jobs. And they lock us into a cycle of endless hardware replacement.
So when a city like Westfield hands out a 40‑year tax deal and gets nothing but an empty promise in return, it is not just embarrassing. It is a warning flare.
Across New England, communities are starting to push back. In Maine, debates over large‑scale computing projects have led to a proposed moratorium (it was vetoed), as towns try to get ahead of facilities that could overwhelm their grids and water systems. Even when the jobs are real, residents are asking whether a handful of technicians is worth the noise, the diesel generators, and the long‑term lock‑in to heavy energy use. Fourteen U.S. states are considering restricting or banning new data centers in 2026 and beyond. A JPMorgan analysis last month found that more than 60% of data-center capacity planned for completion in 2027 isn’t yet under construction, and another 7% is delayed.
You can feel the mood shifting. People are no longer dazzled by the word “data.” They want to know how many gallons of water a facility will evaporate on a hot August day. They want to know how many diesel generators will kick on during a heat wave when the grid is already stressed. They want to know why their property taxes are going up while multinational tech companies get decades of exemptions.
I am not anti‑technology. I use AI tools. I store things in the cloud. But I also live in a place where rivers run low in summer and where we are told to conserve power on the hottest days. When I look at the Westfield data center saga, I see a fork in the road.
One path says: keep chasing hyperscale projects, keep handing out tax breaks, and hope the promises come true. The other path says: slow down, demand real environmental standards, insist on transparency about energy and water use, and ask whether this is truly the best use of land, public money, and community patience.
Max Hartshorne is a local blogger, publisher, and travel podcast host in South Deerfield. You can read and subscribe to his Substack here. https://substack.com/@maxdeerfield.