Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn has introduced a hearing order to discuss a moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers in the city. The order, filed on April 29th, marks the third recent local effort to restrict the expansion of data centers in Massachusetts.
In Lowell, which already has a data center, city councilors passed a one-year moratorium on further data center development in March. Additionally, residents involved with Honest Future for Lowell filed a lawsuit on April 27th against the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection the owner of the current data center, the Markley Group. The lawsuit challenges the July 2025 DEP’s approval of an air quality permit and an administrative consent order both tied to the addition of new diesel generators to the site.
In Everett, the city council is considering a measure endorsed by the planning board to restrict data center development in the Docklands Innovation District, which is a 100-acre redevelopment site near the Mystic River. There is an associated petition which has has drawn more than 1,300 signatures.
The growing deployment of artificial intelligence requires an ever-increasing number of data centers. These data centers in turn impose environmental burdens on the communities in which they are built and increase the demand for energy within and beyond their borders. Local movements, as well as state-wide ones such as the recent effort in Maine, are an important way of drawing attention to another set of costs imposed by the expansion of artificial intelligence and help ensure that the corporations that utilize these data centers aren’t able to externalize these costs.
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