Cherry Hill joins a growing list of South Jersey municipalities to formally ban large-scale data centers
The township's unanimously passed ordinance comes as debate around AI technology continues nationwide.
Cherry Hill just became the latest municipality in New Jersey to formally ban the development of large-scale data centers.
Township council unanimously passed an ordinance Monday night that lists data centers as a non-permitted land use within the township’s borders.
“We don’t think that Cherry Hill should be a guinea pig,” Cherry Hill Mayor David Fleisher said after the council meeting. “So while the technology is evolving, we wanted to be proactive and make sure that we eliminated a problem before it became one.”
The ordinance also clarifies the difference between the now-forbidden data centers used for artificial intelligence or cloud storage and the small server rooms used by standalone businesses for file storage, which will still be permitted.
The move is consistent with the goals outlined in Cherry Hill’s master plan, said Christopher Dochney, a certified city planner working with the township on the ordinance.
This includes “maintaining Cherry Hill as a garden suburb, maintaining a desirable visual environment and attractive community, and wanting to preserve natural resources,” he said.
It also aligns with the economic development portion of the plan, he said, which prioritizes job creation, job retention, and “providing an economic boon to the residents of Cherry Hill.”
“[Data centers] consume a lot of land, they use a lot of water, they take up a lot of energy, and they also tend to be very big, ugly buildings,” Dochney said. “Things that are all directly inconsistent and contradictory to the stated goals of your master plan.”
In order for a data center to be built in the future, a developer would need a land use variance from the township’s zoning board — generally the most difficult land use approval to obtain, he said.
Up to this point, no data center developers have approached the township, “and we wanted to keep it that way,” Fleisher said.
“As you see in some other towns, by the time an application is submitted, legally it might be too late,” he said. “And we didn’t want to find ourselves in that position.”
Data center pushback in South Jersey
Cherry Hill, the most populous municipality in Camden County, is just the latest in a growing number of South Jersey towns to pass similar bans as debate around data centers continues across the country.
This month, Burlington County’s Mansfield and Chesterfield Townships also approved bans after Medford Township did the same a month prior. Millville in Cumberland County banned large-scale data centers in May after promotions for a new 66-acre “Millville Energy & Data Center Campus” circulated online.
Meanwhile, a massive data center in Vineland is set for completion by the end of the year.
In Gloucester County, a real estate developer is suing Monroe Township for $300 million after the municipality issued a ban on data centers and subsequently denied their plans to build a 1 million-square-foot data center and a warehouse.
With the restrictions on data centers now in place in Cherry Hill, Fleisher said he isn’t worried about potential legal action against the township.
“We were very cautious to be very thoughtful and methodical about how we were going to address this,” he said. “We made sure we had the appropriate professionals go trough the right process and have all the accurate information on the record before we took formal action.”
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