New Jersey just told data-center operators to start keeping records. Governor Mikie Sherrill signed a new law in South Brunswick on August 27 requiring data centers to report how much water and power they use, according to TAPinto and News From The States. It's a disclosure law, not a permit law — and that difference is the whole story for anyone pricing work in this market.

Because while Trenton was writing a reporting requirement, close to 100 New Jersey towns had already written something a lot blunter: an outright ban. Gothamist's count, published September 5, puts the number of municipalities that have zoned data centers out of existence at nearly 100 statewide — and reports that nobody in Trenton is drafting a statewide version of that ban anytime soon.

So if you're chasing electrical, mechanical, or sitework scope on a New Jersey data center, the state capital isn't where you check first. The town is. A site can look clean on paper — good power access, a motivated developer, room to build — and still be dead the moment you cross into a township that already closed the door. New Jersey's new law doesn't touch that. It just means whatever DOES get built there now carries a water-and-power reporting line in its operating permit, which is a new compliance item for the mechanical and electrical trades and for whoever runs the building once it's live.

New York, for comparison, is running the opposite playbook: Executive Order 62 froze new 50-megawatt-plus projects statewide in July, no local opt-out involved. New Jersey went the other way — no state ban, just a disclosure rule sitting on top of a patchwork of local ones. For a contractor whose truck crosses state lines, that patchwork is the map you actually need, not the press release out of Trenton.

Before you bid New Jersey data-center work, pull the zoning ordinance for the specific township, not just the state law, and confirm the site isn't one of the roughly 100 towns that already said no.