On March 10, 2026, Lowell's city council voted unanimously to impose a moratorium on Markley Group's data center expansion. The vote was unanimous. Lowell's Markley facility, constructed in 2015, is the largest data center in Massachusetts. It serves Boston Logan Airport and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts among other institutional clients. Property values near the facility doubled after Markley's 2015 acquisition. None of that goodwill survived the expansion proposal, because the expansion was not what residents understood they were living next to when the original facility was built.
The complaints are specific and documented. Residents near the facility reported that winter electricity bills increased from $40 to $177 monthly. Alex Solange, one resident who testified before the council, attributed the increase to the load the data center places on local grid infrastructure. The AC units positioned approximately 100 feet from residential homes produce noise that residents described as comparable to a jet engine. Jacqueline Coles testified about air quality concerns and their effect on her foster child's asthma. The diesel fumes from backup generators reportedly damaged vegetation in residential areas. Councilor Sean McDonough characterized the situation as continued growth at the expense of existing residents. The council agreed. Zero dissenting votes.
Markley and its supporters made the economic case at the council hearings. Union workers and data center employees testified that the jobs the facility provides lifted families from poverty. Tommy Cruz, a Markley employee, noted that approximately one-third of the facility's workers are Lowell residents. Governor Maura Healey's 2024 Mass Leads Act provided $100 million in tax exemptions for data center construction specifically to position Massachusetts as an AI infrastructure hub. None of it was enough. The community coalition that showed up to oppose the expansion outnumbered and, on the evidence of the vote, persuaded the elected officials who had to weigh the trade-off.
This is the pattern that the data center industry needs to study. Wisconsin saw similar opposition to data center growth. The thermal and acoustic footprint of the current generation of air-cooled data center infrastructure, specifically the CRAC units, cooling towers, backup generators, and the electrical load they place on local distribution networks, creates quality-of-life impacts that communities adjacent to these facilities experience directly. The industry's standard response has been economic: jobs, tax revenue, digital infrastructure investment. The Lowell vote suggests that response is no longer sufficient when the facility is close enough to residential areas that residents can hear it running at 2 AM.
Lowell is a signal. The AI infrastructure buildout requires substantially more data center capacity, built faster, than the previous decade's construction pace. The sites that minimize thermal and acoustic footprint, through liquid cooling architectures that reduce or eliminate exterior CRAC units, closed-loop water systems that reduce evaporative drift, and better facility siting relative to residential areas, are not just better environmental outcomes. They are more defensible permitting positions. An operator who shows up to a planning board with a liquid-cooled facility that has no visible cooling tower and limited generator runtime is having a different conversation than one proposing another 100,000 square feet of air-cooled server floor adjacent to a neighborhood. The Lowell moratorium is the cost of not having that conversation early enough.