What’s it like living in the shadow of an AI data center? These Vineland residents know.
They are some of the first in the Philly area to experience firsthand what it’s like to live near the massive facilities. Some of their neighbors have sold their homes to the data center developers.
When Amber Ayrer bought her Vineland home 25 years ago, she envisioned growing old there, enjoying lazy afternoons with the windows open and a view of farmland from her front door.
After her adult daughter, Ally, suffered a traumatic brain injury, Amber made the rancher accessible, installing a ramp that aides use to push Ally’s wheelchair outside for her daily walks.
The place had all the makings of a forever home, Amber Ayrer said — until a massive AI data center moved in across the street.
Now, the 71-year-old looks out her front windows at the hulking DataOne facility, a windowless compound surrounded by walls and metal fences.
In recent months, Ayrer said, the 2.4-million-square-foot complex has emitted a near-constant hum. She struggles to sleep, she said, and has suffered from headaches. She turns the TV on to mask the sound.
Residents who live farther away have also complained about the noise, including in a recent lawsuit that was thrown out due to procedural issues. In the suit, residents said the Cumberland County Department of Health measured the hum as higher than 50 decibels a mile away in the middle of the night. A sound higher than 50 decibels is equal to a running refrigerator and is 10 times louder than a typical suburban area at night.
Ayrer, who was not involved in the lawsuit, said she doesn’t want to move, even as she sees neighbors sell their homes to the data center developers.
“In order to get another home, I’d have to get one built” to be accessible, Ayrer said, standing in her entryway. She shrugged, adding, “I need to be here for my daughter.”
The noise has quieted, she noted, since around Sept. 22. That’s when the New Jersey DEP ordered the data center to pay a $1 million fine for running 62 gas generators without the required permits. She isn’t sure why the hum stopped, or whether it is related to the fine.
» READ MORE: Vineland AI data center hit with a $1 million fine
But the sound will eventually return, she assumes, perhaps even louder when the center is fully operational.
The Ayrers are some of the first Philly-area residents to live in the shadow of a massive AI data center. Only a handful of homeowners live within eyesight of DataOne’s South Lincoln Avenue complex in Vineland.
They used to have more neighbors. But since 2025, DataOne Vineland and LJR Real Estate — which is registered to the address of Northeast Precast, a local company that has partnered with DataOne — have purchased at least five surrounding homes for a combined $3 million, according to online property records.
DataOne and Northeast Precast did not respond to requests for comment about the acquisitions. Several former Vineland residents who sold their homes to these companies could not be reached or declined to comment.
Asked about residents’ concerns, DataOne spokesperson Naomi Rice shared a previous statement, which said in part that the facility was “transitioning to low-emission, quiet fuel cells.” These generate energy through an electrochemical reaction rather than combustion, pistons, or rotating machinery.
Nebius Group, which is operating the center’s internal AI infrastructure, says the fuel cells from Bloom Energy — a company expanding locally — and enhanced sound mitigation will make for a quieter environment than what residents experienced during construction, according to spokesperson Ava Iuliucci.
Charles-Antoine Beyney, DataOne’s founder and chief executive officer, previously said the Vineland center would use “breakthrough” technology to reduce its environmental impact. He said the complex would be a good neighbor, promising a vertical farm — which uses technology to grow crops indoors — to help feed Vineland residents in need.
“Most of the data centers that are being built today suck, big time,” Beyney said in January.
“No freaking way am I going to do what the entire industry is doing … just killing our communities and killing our lungs to make money.”
What it looks like near a South Jersey data center
The dark exterior of DataOne abuts busy South Lincoln Avenue, towering above homes and farms on the outskirts of Vineland City. In spots, rows of crops extend to the data center’s walls.
On a recent day, the data center appeared abuzz with activity, although residents said it was relatively quiet, as cars and yellow school buses drove in and out of its gated-off parking lot. Giant “no trespassing” signs are prominently displayed.
While the front portion of the data center appeared complete, cranes farther back reached into the sky.
Meanwhile, several large homes across from the entrance — purchased by the data center developers and associates — appeared abandoned, with recycling cans askew in the driveways, indoor and outdoor lights on in the middle of the day, and swing sets sitting empty in the backyards. No one answered the doors.
At another home, a woman shook her head, saying she’d lived there forever and would never speak publicly about the development across the street.
Who is behind the Vineland data center?
Data centers like this one handle the cloud-storage and computing needs of increasingly sophisticated AI tools.
DataOne, a French company that manages advanced data centers, is the owner, operator, and builder of the Vineland data center. Its client, Nebius Group, an Amsterdam-based AI-infrastructure company, operates the center’s internal technology, which fuels Microsoft’s AI tools.
As demand for these facilities has surged, so has the controversy surrounding them. Across the country, proposed complexes have received fierce pushback from nearby residents concerned about environmental, noise, quality-of-life, and property-value impacts.
» READ MORE: Human reporters explain why AI data centers are so controversial in the Philly suburbs and beyond
The debate has intensified in recent weeks as some top AI executives urge a slowdown of the technology amid fears that it may eventually wipe out humanity.
Several of these facilities have been proposed in the Philadelphia region, from King of Prussia to Limerick. But few plans have been approved.
DataOne Vineland could become the region’s first hyperscale AI data center. The developers have said the complex is partially operational, and they expect it to be complete by the end of the year.
Theresa Lewis, who has owned her home for 47 years, said living by the data center has gotten worse in recent months.
Stepping outside and seeing the building, “I think of a prison, and I’m the prisoner with the noise,” said Lewis, 74, who compares the sound to a tractor trailer idling outside her home all day and night.
“You get up in the morning and you’re in a foul mood,” Lewis said.
Both she and Ayrer said they have called the Cumberland County Department of Health to report excessive noise in the middle of the night, but doing so comes at a cost. They said they then have to get up, get dressed, turn the lights on, and wait for an official to come take a decibel reading, making for another sleepless night.
Data centers are being built in different communities
The scene in Vineland is vastly different from the one outside Amazon’s 2-million-square-foot data center campus in Falls Township, Bucks County, the Philadelphia region’s other facility nearing completion.
That data center sits deep inside the Keystone Trade Center, an industrial hub surrounded by water, with no homes in sight. On a recent day, tractor trailers whizzed by Keystone’s main entrance. Only the transmission wires overhead hinted at what may be inside the private property.
Still, neighbors have pushed back against the complex, with more than 5,000 people signing a petition in favor of a data center moratorium in Falls Township.
Elsewhere, data center plans proposed by developer Brian O’Neill have faced fierce opposition in King of Prussia and on the outskirts of Conshohocken. So have projects in East Whiteland, where data center construction recently began, and in East Vincent, where a center was proposed for the site of the former Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
In Vineland, Lewis said she wishes she and her neighbors had a chance to push back against the data center before it was built. Residents were first asked to provide input about the project at a contentious town hall in January, more than a year after the project was approved by city council and months after construction started.
“I don’t want to move — and who is going to pay what the house is worth with that right there?” Lewis said, motioning to the data center across the street. “But I wake up angry.”
She added: “I can’t imagine living next to this for the rest of my life.”
