New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s company is stepping into a political minefield, proposing to build one of the largest data centers in the country in the Central Massachusetts town of Sutton, just as opposition to the facilities is intensifying.
In this area, known for its farmland and home to about 9,700 residents, the Kraft Group would build a massive, $16 billion data center campus. The project would include 10 buildings, erected on land owned by the Krafts’ Unified Packaging box business about 10 miles south of Worcester. It would push Massachusetts into the world of big data centers, as the fourth-biggest facility in the United States, according to the research firm Cleanview.
The proposal must be approved by multiple town committees before moving ahead, and it puts Kraft once again at the center of political controversy, this time as data centers have become political poison across the country. Voters last week from Maine to California approved 44 referendums to block or slow data center construction. Last month, the Western Massachusetts community of Westfield moved to block a large data center proposed there.
The Sutton Select Board met Tuesday night to hear about the project amid a packed hearing room. Chair Jonathan Anderson said the board would not immediately vote on the matter and planned to hold multiple public forums to discuss the proposal with the community.
“This is not a project that’s a done deal,” he said. “It’s far from it. This is the very, very beginning of the process.”
The board allowed only about 15 minutes of public comments at the start of the meeting and all six speakers said they opposed the project. “I would like to see this process stopped tonight,” Sutton resident Sarah Osterman Stone said.
The crowd remained rowdy after the public comments, shouting as the board tried to move on with its business. “Kill it now,” one person shouted. “Just end the process,” another added.
The Sutton proposal would dwarf the Westfield project. When completed in 2033, the Kraft data center would draw 900 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a sizable city. Three larger data centers are already in operation; many larger projects are in the planning or construction stages, including Meta’s 6,500 megawatt data center in Louisiana.
Given the fierce opposition to data center construction and comments at Tuesday’s meeting, the Kraft Group is likely to face strong local opposition. Residents have also been stirring in comments on social media.
“There’s been a pretty quick response from the community expressing concerns,” said state Representative Joe McKenna, who represents the area. The main issues are that the project could drive up electricity rates, consume too much water, and generate noise, he said. “They’re concerns that I share, but I’m also not willing to say ‘No’ just based on a fear of an unknown, or fear of an uncertainty,” McKenna added.
Sutton’s town manager, Austin J. Cyganiewicz, confirmed the $16 billion proposal from the Kraft Group and Unified Global Packaging Group in a letter sent Monday to the town’s Select Board.
The Kraft Group did not return a request for comment Tuesday.
The Krafts clashed last summer with Foxborough town officials over $8 million in security costs for the World Cup. And in September, Robert Kraft drew wide criticism for barring rap artist Macklemore from performing at Gillette Stadium over his remarks in support of Palestinians.
As for the move into data centers, Massachusetts has so far not been an appealing destination for the large, energy-hungry facilities powering the AI boom — Sutton would be the first. That’s because the state has among the highest electricity rates in the country, not to mention high land prices and construction costs, IDC analyst Matt Eastwood said.
But as the AI boom moves from early development to broader usage, every part of the country will need local, large data centers, according to Eastwood.
If approved, the first two buildings at the Sutton site, off Boston and Providence roads, would open in 2029, and two more facilities would come online each year through 2033, for a total of 10.
The Kraft Group did not yet provide information about possible tenants of the data center. But they’re making a bet based on the plans of AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars leasing space in such facilities.
Given the forecasts of exploding AI usage, businesses eventually will need nearby data centers to avoid software slowdowns, Eastwood said. “You’ll end up with an AI infrastructure that’s much more distributed and not as centralized,” he said, with a handful of megasized data centers needed in New England.
In parts of the country with numerous data centers, the facilities appear to have driven up electricity rates. The Sutton campus, if fully built, would draw power equal to about 7 percent of the state’s peak usage on the hottest summer day last year.
For the town of Sutton, which is struggling to balance its budget over the next few years, property tax revenue from the data center could win over skeptics.
The full facility would represent a multiple of the $2.8 billion in assessed value of all the property in Sutton, Cyganiewicz wrote.
The first two buildings on the data center campus would pay $10.4 million annually in property taxes starting in fiscal year 2031. That sum would rise to about $27.8 million a year on all 10 buildings in 2035, Cyganiewicz estimated in his letter.
In a town with a $40 million annual budget, that would be a huge windfall, potentially cutting property tax bills for residents by thousands of dollars. An average single-family homeowner in 2031 could see their tax bill fall to $6,846 from $9,134, according to Cyganiewicz.
Still, “the proposal is tentative,” he wrote. “No application has been filed, and important details on power, water, equipment and site impacts are still to come.”
The proposal was previously reported by MassLive.
Data centers have become increasingly controversial as critics point to their environmental impacts, energy consumption, and broader concerns about the effect of artificial intelligence on the job market. Governor Maura Healey in September signed an executive order to block new data centers in Massachusetts unless they get local approval.
US Representative Jim McGovern, whose district includes Sutton, has been a leading opponent of data centers and cosponsored a bill to impose a national moratorium. But McGovern said it would be up to residents to decide whether to move forward with the Kraft proposal.
“Costs of utilities have gone up for a lot of people because the data centers eat up a lot of energy and take a lot of water ... so for me, I don’t like them,” he said. “But, ultimately, it’s up to the people of Sutton.”
Nearly across the board during the midterms, pro-data center candidates backed by Big Tech, including Senate candidates Jon Husted in Ohio and Ken Paxton in Texas, lost.
Many House candidates supporting AI and data centers came up short, too, including Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin and Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania. And in dozens of local referendums around the country, from Wells, Maine, to Defiance, Ohio, and Emporia, Kans., voters approved bans or restrictions on data centers.
Jim Puzzanghera of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman. Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.