For all the talk about how New Jersey is losing out on data centers — and the revenue that comes with them — there’s this tidbit from a recent report by real estate firm JLL: New Jersey is now a Top 5 market for data centers in the country.
According to JLL, New Jersey’s data center footprint is growing because of record demand from financial services, artificial intelligence deployments and new state legislation proposed for a special incentivized utility rate. Tax incentives and new special utility rates are driving strong interest in 100-plus-megawatt AI data center developments.
It’s not all positive news.
While the JLL report said the state is ideal for edge and AI inference deployments and ideally positioned to handle financial services inference applications, New Jersey has limited 2+ MW of contiguous space options in the next 12 months.
The growth has legislators concerned.
Assemblymen Dave Bailey (D-Glassboro) and Joe Danielsen (D-Somerset) recently introduced a bill for a special incentivized utility rate. It would require electric public utilities in the state to develop and apply special rules for certain data centers to protect non-data center customers from increased costs.
The rules would apply to large load facilities that have or are projected to have a maximum monthly demand of at least 100 MW.
The state is benefiting from recent moves:
- Livingston-based AI giant CoreWeave has begun a large campus development and data-center construction at the former Merck campus in Kenilworth.
- Amazon Web Services is expanding with a new availability zone in New Jersey, its seventh second-generation availability zone in the state. This local zone brings the company’s services closer to end users in the region, helping reduce latency for applications like real-time gaming, financial transactions and media production.
