More than 100 New Jersey municipalities have now passed bans or moratoriums on data centers, according to NJ.com's count published October 19, up from a smaller cluster of towns fighting individual projects just weeks ago.
The tally, compiled from local ordinances and planning board records across the state, shows the opposition has moved past the handful of towns sitting near specific proposed sites — Mahwah, Woodbridge and others that have already turned up on this desk's tracking — into a statewide pattern of pre-emptive zoning bans. NJ.com reports towns are increasingly acting before a developer ever files a site plan, writing data centers out of permitted uses altogether rather than fighting one project at a time.
A companion poll reported the same day by the Central Jersey outlet mycentraljersey.com found New Jersey residents broadly support AI development in the abstract but don't want a data center sited near them — the same not-in-my-backyard split that's shown up in township meetings from Mahwah to the former nursery site this desk has already covered.
The pattern matters beyond New Jersey's borders. New York's own new-construction pause under Executive Order 62 — the 50-megawatt threshold signed July 14 — was written for a state where legislators worried about exactly this kind of patchwork fight breaking out town by town. New Jersey has no equivalent state-level gate; the fight is happening entirely at the municipal level, ordinance by ordinance, which means a developer can still find a willing town, but the map of where is shrinking fast.
Separately, Data Center Dynamics reported October 19 that Alcoa has sold a former aluminum smelter site in upstate New York to a data-center developer for $315 million — a reminder that brownfield industrial sites with existing grid interconnections remain attractive acquisition targets even as green-field proposals draw local fire. Terms of the deal, including the buyer's identity and the site's power capacity, were not detailed in the report cited.
What to do next
If you're chasing electrical, mechanical or sitework scope tied to data-center construction in New Jersey, the geography of where that work can legally land is narrowing by the week — check your target municipality's current zoning code before pricing anything, not just its planning-board agenda. A site that looked open two months ago may already be banned outright.
For New York-facing contractors, the Alcoa smelter sale is worth watching: industrial sites with existing power infrastructure are exactly the kind of property that can clear EO 62's bar if the buyer already has permits in motion or qualifies under one of the order's carve-outs. Confirm which exemption applies — pre-July 14 DEC filing, manufacturing use, or already under construction — before treating any New York data-center lead as biddable work.