RESPONSIBLE DEVELOPMENT // 001
Not All Data Centers Are Built the Same.
Data centers have a reputation — drinking water by the millions of gallons, straining local grids, paving open land. The Millville Energy & Data Center Campus was engineered to be the opposite of that story. We start from a contaminated, hard-to-use industrial site and turn it into clean, self-powered, community-positive infrastructure. Here's exactly how.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Data Center Concerns, Answered by the Experts
The questions below are the real concerns raised by residents and officials. The answers are drawn from sworn-style public testimony given by infrastructure, energy, planning, and economic-development professionals.
POWER & ELECTRIC BILLS
Won't a data center strain our power grid and drive up everyone's electric rates?
The most-cited evidence runs the other way. When a large customer joins a utility, it shoulders a share of the system's fixed costs — and regulators have found that existing customers' bills can actually fall.
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"When data centers are added to the electric grid, the cost for existing customers goes down... they absorb some of the cost of doing business and they pay for all of the costs to serve them. Arizona regulators found bringing data centers to the system will save residential customers about $100 a year. In Michigan, the regulator found the utility is going to defer future rate increases."
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Matt Dorsey
Energy & Utility Ratemaking Specialist
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"There is no evidence that electric rates have been impacted by data centers. That said, the Commonwealth put protections in place to protect ratepayers going forward — a separate rate class, a take-or-pay system where the data centers must pay for whatever they reserve whether they use it or not, and responsibility for any new infrastructure."
Buddy Riser
Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
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And a facility doesn't have to lean on the grid at all:
"Solid oxide fuel cells — primarily from Bloom Energy — run on natural gas, biogas, and even hydrogen. They're clean, they don't vibrate like turbines or generators, and they're very efficient and modular. With biogas and waste-heat recapture you get 90% efficiency from those fuel cells."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
WATER
Don't data centers use enormous amounts of water and threaten our aquifer and drinking water?
Modern cooling has largely decoupled data centers from heavy water use, and the city would keep the power to require it.
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"Water was the enemy of data centers — because of all the electronics. Now with closed-loop cooling it recaptures that water and the evaporation from the process, so water usage goes down significantly, if at all. There's also dielectric fluid — your car isn't cooled by water, it's cooled by antifreeze. Same idea."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
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"Microsoft has zero-water designs. In East Windsor, the town approved a QTS data center expansion on the condition that they install closed-loop water cooling. And here, the town owns the water utility — so you have the ability to restrict the service from the water utility, and that would apply as well."
Matt DorseyEnergy & Utility Ratemaking Specialist
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"We have more than 200 data centers, and those data centers use less than 10% of the total potable water in Loudoun County. It is not a drain on our water system."Buddy RiserEconomist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
"We have a contaminated plume that runs from the South Jersey Gas area to the river, better than 100 feet down — the water's non-potable. What better place to pull that water out of the ground, treat it, clean it, use it for cooling, and put it back in the ground to flush contaminants back toward those wells? That's typical groundwater cleanup 101."
Tom McGinty
Millville Resident, Geologist & 20-year EPA Veteran
NOISE
Aren't data centers noisy neighbors?
Siting plus modern engineering keeps the noise contained — and the city can write the limits into any approval.
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"Keep them in your industrial zones. With liquid cooling and solid oxide fuel cells there's no combustion and near-zero vibration. And then I'd do setback sound walls — you have the ability to design these and dictate the design for the benefit of the community."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
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"You can require acoustic enclosures, acoustical walls, setback requirements, and a certain decibel limit measured at the property line."
Michael Molinsky
Attorney, Fox Rothschild LLP
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"I've been up to the data center 20 times. I pulled in their driveway. Can't hear any noise."
Tom McGinty
Millville Resident, Geologist & 20-year EPA Veteran
HEAT & AIR QUALITY
What about waste heat and air pollution?
The experts framed waste heat as a resource, not just a byproduct — and pointed to communities already capturing it.Â
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"Waste heat is a wasted opportunity. At our Paris data centers we took the waste heat and to this day we heat the Olympic pool in Paris. In Stockholm they're heating 30,000 apartments with data center waste heat through their heating grid. Greenhouses use it — their biggest expense is heating, and it goes down to next to nothing."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
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"The EU has a scheme to limit and directly regulate heat emissions from data centers."
Matt Dorsey
Energy & Utility Ratemaking Specialist
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"The air quality in Loudoun County is better today than it was a decade ago. We have the lowest health incident rate in all of Virginia, and our asthma and lung-related diseases are well below the national average."
Buddy Riser
Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
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JOBS & LAND USE
Data centers only create a few jobs. Why give up the land?
Headcount inside the building understates the economic footprint — and the per-acre value is unmatched.
"During construction there are a lot of blue-collar jobs — plumbing, electricians, HVAC. Once it's running you need local plumbing and electric companies on call, plus indirect jobs. One developer worked with a local university to create training programs. Two weeks ago, four firms said $750 million this year alone they're putting into capex."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
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"We have 15,000 jobs inside data centers now, and for every job in the data center we have another six jobs in the ecosystem. A square foot of office in Loudoun is assessed at $126; that same square foot inside a data center is $858. We'd have to build 2 million square feet of office to get the same revenue we get from a 250,000-foot data center."
Buddy Riser
Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
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FISCAL IMPACT
Is it worth it for a town like ours?
Loudoun County's experience is the clearest real-world ledger of what data center revenue can fund.
"This year we'll get about $1.2 billion in local revenue from data centers — that's 45% of our budget on just 3% of our land. We've built 32 new schools, 15 new fire stations, six new libraries — while lowering taxes on our residents by 48 cents on the dollar. We're now the lowest-taxed jurisdiction in all of the greater Washington area. The average homeowner with two homes saves about $7,000 a year."
Buddy Riser
Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
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"Through smart planning you can address all of the concerns, and you could reduce the taxes for your residents instead of increasing them."
Michael Molinsky
Attorney, Fox Rothschild LLP
COMMUNITY & SITING
Aren't these just being forced on a community that doesn't want them — and on land we'd rather protect?
The recommendation was never "build anywhere." It was for the community to set its own terms — and to use land that can't be used for much else.
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"I would never presume to tell you what to do with your zoning. The community should decide if they want them, and if they do, where they want them and under which conditions they'll take them. But I don't think an out-and-out ban makes sense given the fiscal responsibilities of all of our communities."
Buddy Riser
Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia
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"We're not taking green acres. We're not taking farmland. We're talking about brownfields that you can't do anything with — contaminated former glass-factory sites that we demolished with no grants and no free money."
Anthony DeSantisÂ
Property Owner, 1300 Wheaton Ave LLC
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For scale: Loudoun County is 521 square miles — actually smaller than Cumberland County's 678 — and two-thirds of it is rural. The model doesn't require becoming a metropolis.
THE ORDINANCE ITSELF
Why not just ban them to be safe?
A licensed planner warned that the ban is written so broadly it reaches well beyond data centers — and loses the ability to evaluate good projects.
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"We're standing here within a school — Millville's school system uses a data center to power its district-wide technology. The way your definition is written, it would include local facilities within businesses, buildings, or offices in your community. It's overreaching, and it's contrary to your master plan. Your 2025 re-examination report was adopted just over a year ago and does not recommend prohibiting this as a land use — in fact it considers allowing for a variety of new innovative land uses."
Tiffany Morsey
Licensed Professional Planner (AICP), New Jersey
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"Impose any standard that you want on a case-by-case basis. If someone comes in and they don't convince you, don't approve them. But if you impose a blanket ban, you lose the opportunity to even evaluate."
Matt Dorsey
Energy & Utility Ratemaking Specialist
APPEARANCE
They don't have to be eyesores?
"These don't have to look like warehouses. You can have different designs — rooftops that are green. There's no reason for them to look like a box. Look at Denmark, Norway, South Korea — communities that really want them have iconic designs."
Barry Smith
Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
All quotations are drawn from public testimony given at the May 19, 2026 Millville Board of Commissioners meeting and are lightly edited for clarity from the meeting recording. Figures are as stated by the speakers. Speakers' titles reflect roles described in their testimony.
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Matt Dorsey — Energy & Utility Ratemaking Specialist
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Buddy Riser — Economist & Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, VA
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Barry Smith — Digital Infrastructure Executive (former Equinix)
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Michael Molinsky — Attorney, Fox Rothschild LLP
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Tiffany Morsey — Licensed Professional Planner (AICP), New Jersey
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Tom McGinty — Millville Resident, Geologist & 20-year EPA Veteran
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Anthony DeSantis — Property Owner, 1300 Wheaton Ave LLC
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LAND USE // 002
We Didn't Take Farmland. We Reclaimed It.
The Millville campus is a brownfield redevelopment — not a greenfield conversion. We are not paving open land, displacing agriculture, or clearing habitat. We are taking a 66-acre site that was already industrialized, already disturbed, and already zoned for heavy industrial use, and giving it a productive second life.
The site sits on groundwater that is contaminated and non-potable — unfit for drinking, agriculture, or most conventional uses. For most developments, that's a dead end. For a purpose-built modern data center, it's an ideal match. The very characteristics that rule this land out for almost everything else are exactly what make it right for us.
BROWNFIELD, NOT GREENFIELD
Reusing disturbed industrial land. Zero new farmland or habitat consumed.
ALREADY ENTITLED
Industrial-zoned with an approved redevelopment agreement and 15-year tax abatement.
HIGHEST & BEST USE
A constrained site matched to the one use that truly fits it.
EXISTING FOOTPRINT // 003
The Power Footprint Was Already Here.
This is not a quiet field we're industrializing. The site carried a significant legacy industrial and power load for years. We're not introducing heavy infrastructure to a place that never had it — we're modernizing and making more efficient a footprint that already existed.
Existing high-pressure gas service (8-inch and 6-inch lines at 125 PSI) and established substation interconnection mean we're building on proven capacity, not starting from scratch on untouched ground. Reuse is the most sustainable form of development there is.
ESTABLISHED INFRASTRUCTURE
High-pressure gas and substation interconnection already in place.
MODERNIZED, NOT MULTIPLIED
Replacing an aging industrial load with a cleaner, more efficient one.
WATER STEWARDSHIP // 004
Advanced Cooling. Non-Potable Source. No Strain on the Community.
Older data centers earned their reputation by consuming millions of gallons of drinking water for cooling. That is not how this campus is designed. We deploy modern, low-water cooling technologies — closed-loop and high-efficiency systems that dramatically reduce water draw compared to legacy evaporative designs. And the water we do use comes from the on-site non-potable source that cannot serve any other purpose. We are not competing with households, farms, or local businesses for clean drinking water. The community's water supply stays the community's.
NON-POTABLE SOURCE
Cooling draws from the contaminated on-site water, not municipal drinking supply.
LOW-WATER COOLING
Modern closed-loop systems minimize total consumption.
ZERO COMPETITION
No draw on the local drinking-water supply.
ENERGY INDEPENDENCE // 005
Rather than drawing down the regional grid and driving up costs for everyone around us, the campus is built for on-site generation — producing our own power so we don't strain local supply.
Excess and off-peak generation can be pushed back to support and stabilize the local grid. The infrastructure required to power a facility at this scale — substation upgrades, modernized interconnection, hardened distribution — are improvements that strengthen the surrounding community's electrical backbone, not just ours.
We Generate Our Own. And We Give Back.
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SELF-GENERATING
On-site generation reduces draw on the public grid.
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GRID SUPPORT
Excess capacity can help stabilize local supply.
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INFRASTRUCTURE UPGRADES
Modernizing distribution the whole community relies on.
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COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Long-term investment in local energy reliability.
THE PRINCIPLE // 006
Responsible by Design.
A data center should leave its land and its community better than it found them. That principle shaped every decision at Millville: a reclaimed brownfield instead of open land, contaminated water put to use instead of drinking water drawn down, self-generated power instead of grid strain, and infrastructure investment that flows back to the people who live here.
Not all data centers are built the same. This one was built for the community it's part of.
DEVELOPMENT VISION
The DeSantis Group
Visionary developers behind the A1 Data and A1 Power projects, The DeSantis Group brings unparalleled expertise to the Millville Campus. Their commitment to expert engineering and hyperscale growth ensures a future-proofed environment for enterprise digital infrastructure.
Visionary developers behind the A1 Data and A1 Power projects, The DeSantis Group