New Jersey's data-center fight has a new flashpoint, and this one sits on farmland the state spent decades trying to save.
Residents near the Princeton Nurseries site in South Brunswick are organizing against a data center proposed for the property, according to The Daily Princetonian. The site carries historical weight beyond its acreage — Princeton Nurseries was once among the largest commercial nurseries on the East Coast, and preservation advocates have pushed for decades to keep parts of it undeveloped.
The developer has not broken ground, and no site plan approval has been reported — this is an early-stage fight, not a construction story. But it's the same pattern this desk has tracked across New Jersey: a hyperscale or colocation proposal shows up in a municipality, and the planning-board fight becomes the real schedule-setter long before any contractor pulls a permit.
For a New York-based electrical or mechanical contractor eyeing data-center backlog, the lesson keeps repeating. New Jersey has no statewide moratorium like New York's Executive Order 62 — each project lives or dies at the township level. A resident coalition that organizes early, the way Princeton Nurseries neighbors are doing now, can add a year or more to a project's path even in a state that hasn't blocked data centers outright.
Separately, NJ.com reported this week that a large AI data center elsewhere in New Jersey — already under construction — was hit with another lawsuit, with neighbors citing issues beyond noise complaints. Two different projects, two different stages, the same throughline: New Jersey's data-center pipeline is now running through courtrooms and planning boards as much as through utility interconnection queues.
If you're a trade contractor sizing up this market, track the municipality, not just the state. A project's actual construction start in New Jersey depends on whichever planning board, zoning board, or judge gets to it first.