Nottingham, a small Rockingham County town of about 5,000 residents situated roughly 30 minutes from both Concord and Portsmouth, does not typically make statewide news. On Wednesday evening, it became the focal point of a debate that has been building across New Hampshire for months: what role should data centers play in the state’s economic and environmental future, and who gets to decide?
At the center of the controversy is Thomas Moulton, a Seacoast entrepreneur who has proposed building a data center at the Nottingham Business Park off Route 4, at a property located at 145 Old Turnpike Road. The parcel spans approximately 150 acres, with Moulton estimating that around 80 of those acres are usable for development. NHPR reports that by Monday afternoon, a Change.org petition opposing the project had already collected 14,747 signatures, prompting town officials to move the planning board meeting from its usual venue to Nottingham School to handle the anticipated crowd.
The meeting, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, drew a planned protest outside the building. Inside, residents had the opportunity to speak during a general public comment session near the end of the evening.
What’s Being Proposed and Where
The land in question has a history that longtime Nottingham residents remember well. In the early 2000s, a company called USA Springs proposed using the same site as a water bottling operation, a project that generated its own significant local controversy before ultimately collapsing without ever coming to fruition. Now, more than two decades later, the same parcel is back in the spotlight.
Moulton is appearing before the planning board for what officials call a “conceptual consultation,” a preliminary step in the local planning process that allows an applicant to discuss a project with the board in informal terms before committing to a full application. Town Administrator Ellen White was clear about what Wednesday’s session was and was not. “It’s a request for an informal conversation with the planning board: ‘Hey, this is my idea,’” White said. The session itself is not a formal public hearing, and the project is still in early stages.
That framing has not quieted opposition. White acknowledged the volume of public response the town has received since the proposal became known. “It’s been statewide,” she said. “Everything has been in opposition to it.”
The Concerns Driving the Opposition
The swift and intense reaction to Moulton’s proposal reflects anxieties that have been simmering in New Hampshire communities as the data center industry has looked to the state’s available land, relatively lower power costs, and proximity to population centers as attractive development targets.
Chief among the concerns voiced by Nottingham residents and the thousands of people who signed the petition is the question of resource consumption. Data centers are notoriously power-hungry operations, requiring vast amounts of electricity to run the servers themselves and even more to cool them. A large facility can consume as much electricity as a small city, and the strain that would place on New Hampshire’s electrical grid is a legitimate concern, particularly as the state navigates its own energy transition.
Water use is the second major worry. Traditional data center cooling systems can consume millions of gallons of water per year, and in a state where groundwater and surface water are valued environmental and recreational resources, that prospect has alarmed residents and environmental advocates alike.
Moulton has pushed back on the water concern specifically. He described a closed-loop cooling system for the proposed facility, comparing it to the way a car radiator works. “There’s not a drop of water that’s coming off of that property,” he said, adding that the characterizations of his project have gotten ahead of what he’s actually proposing. “I haven’t even had my voice heard yet, and everybody is coming out of the woodwork, and they want to lynch me,” Moulton said. “It’s like, ‘Come on people, relax.’”
Whether a closed-loop system, if implemented as described, would adequately address residents’ water concerns remains a question the planning process will need to examine. Independent verification of such claims is typically part of the environmental review that comes later in any significant development application.
A Statewide Debate Playing Out Locally
The Nottingham fight does not exist in isolation. New Hampshire has been wrestling with data center policy at the state legislative level for months, and the results have been mixed. Lawmakers rejected a bill that would have streamlined data center development by right, preserving local control over where these facilities can be sited. A subsequent effort to establish clearer statewide guidelines for data center zoning through Senate Bill 439 sought to balance economic development interests with community concerns.
That legislative back-and-forth reflects a genuine tension in New Hampshire policy: the state wants to attract technology investment and the tax revenue it generates, but it also has a strong tradition of local control and a population that is deeply skeptical of large industrial developments in rural communities. The data center industry, for its part, argues that modern facilities are cleaner and quieter than traditional manufacturing and offer significant property tax contributions with minimal service demands on host communities.
Moulton’s pitch to Nottingham follows that economic development script. He has suggested that his project would bring increased tax revenues to a town that, like many small NH municipalities, faces perennial pressure to fund services with a limited property tax base. But residents who have watched other communities navigate similar promises say the full picture is more complicated, particularly when power and water infrastructure must be expanded to serve a new facility.
A Town With an Environmental History
Nottingham’s resistance to the data center proposal fits within a broader civic identity that has long prioritized environmental stewardship. According to the Strafford Regional Planning Commission, which provides planning services to the town on a contractual basis, Nottingham was the first municipality in the United States to institute mandatory recycling. That distinction speaks to a community culture that has historically taken natural resource conservation seriously, and it helps explain why a proposal that raises questions about power and water consumption would generate such a visceral response.
The town also sits within a watershed that residents and environmental groups have worked for decades to protect. Rockingham County’s rural communities have resisted large-scale industrial development not out of NIMBYism alone, but out of genuine concern for the quality of life and the natural landscape that make these communities desirable places to live.
What Happens Next
Wednesday’s conceptual consultation was the beginning of a process, not the end of one. Even if the planning board expressed openness to the concept, Moulton would need to file a formal application, submit detailed plans for environmental review, and navigate a public hearing process that gives abutters and other interested parties significant input. At any point, the board could determine that the project does not meet local zoning requirements or that the environmental impacts cannot be adequately mitigated.
The intensity of public opposition before a single formal hearing has been held suggests that Moulton will face a sustained and organized campaign against his proposal. Petitions with nearly 15,000 signatures are not something planning boards can simply ignore, even if they are not legally binding on the board’s ultimate decision.
For residents of Nottingham and communities like it across New Hampshire, the larger question is whether local decision-making processes are up to the task of evaluating a technology sector whose scale and complexity can be difficult for local boards to assess without independent technical expertise. Some towns have sought state assistance in reviewing data center proposals; others have updated their zoning ordinances in anticipation of future applications.
The Nottingham case will be watched closely across the state, both by communities that may face similar proposals and by policymakers still trying to develop a coherent framework for where and how data centers fit into New Hampshire’s future. Recent legislative debate over data center zoning amendments shows that this conversation is far from settled at the state level. What happens in Nottingham may end up shaping that conversation in ways that reach well beyond Route 4.
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