New Hampshire Has No Hyperscale Data Center. Four of Its Towns Restricted Them Anyway.

On Tuesday, September 8, voters in Nottingham, New Hampshire approved a 12-month moratorium on data center construction inside town limits. The tally was 1,335 to 143 — about 90 percent of ballots cast, on the same day as the state primary.

There is no data center proposed in Nottingham. The project that started the fight was withdrawn earlier this year. There is, according to New Hampshire Public Radio, no hyperscale data center anywhere in the state.

That combination — no project, no industry, overwhelming votes against it — is what makes New Hampshire worth reading if you live somewhere the buildout has already arrived. Four towns here have now used four different legal tools, and the differences between those tools are the whole lesson.

Four towns, four instruments

Canterbury banned them outright. At the March 10 town election, Article 4 asked voters whether to amend the zoning ordinance "to ban data centers" by adding a definition and marking Data Centers as Not Allowed in every zone. It passed 322 to 63, according to the town clerk's attested results. No developer had approached Canterbury. The planning board brought the article "proactively due to potential impacts to environmental resources," and its chair told the Concord Monitor the target was "large commercial deployments, think the multi-acre buildings that are going up around the country that take a ton of electricity." A board member quoted in the same story was openly skeptical it was needed: "I just don't think that they're coming here."

Rochester zoned them into a landfill. Rochester's city government concluded it could not do what Canterbury did. Mayor Chuck Grassie told NH Business Review the city "cannot ban data centers outright by law," but could impose a one-year moratorium — so it took a third route instead. The amendment to Chapter 275 of the city ordinances, the subject of an August 18 public hearing, confines data centers to the Recycling Industrial zone and requires a conditional use permit even there. NH Business Review counted 12 properties in that zone; seven of them, more than 975 acres including the Turnkey Landfill, belong to Waste Management. The city enacted the ordinance, which prohibits data centers in every district except that one. Rochester handles adult entertainment the same way.

Nottingham bought time. A 12-month moratorium is not a ban and does not pretend to be. Its stated purpose is to allow the town "adequate time to study the potential land use, environmental infrastructure and fiscal impacts associated with data centers." Planning board chair Drew Stevens told NHPR the year gives officials the chance to write permanent zoning. The moratorium is the scaffolding; the zoning is the building.

Keene is still writing definitions. That is the least dramatic and most underrated step. A town that has not defined "data center" in its land development code has nothing to permit, condition, or refuse.

What is actually being proposed

The project driving the statewide argument is in Bow, at the 345-acre site of the Merrimack Station coal plant, which stopped operating in 2025. Granite Shore Power is pursuing it, and Eversource and Granite Shore filed with federal regulators for a viability study on an interconnection of up to 350 megawatts, as InDepthNH reported. A Bow official confirmed "high-level discussions." The exact size and siting are not in the public record yet.

Three hundred and fifty megawatts is the number to hold onto. In a May column for InDepthNH, Garry Rayno put New England's spare capacity at roughly 300 to 400 megawatts. That is the analyst's figure, not a grid operator's filing, and you should cite it as his — but it explains why the governor's objection is about electricity rather than land.

The governor's moratorium is real, and it is slow

Gov. Kelly Ayotte said on September 2 that she opposes "putting any data center in the state of New Hampshire," and that she would oppose Bow even if Bow wants it. Her stated reason, to NHPR: "I want to reduce energy prices and the amount of energy a data center takes will raise energy costs in the state of New Hampshire, and I can't support that." She said ISO-New England's leadership had confirmed to her that a large data center would raise regional prices, and she wants a moratorium lasting "a period of years."

Read the mechanism, not the headline. Ayotte plans to put the moratorium in her next budget, which means it would not take effect before July 2027 unless she moves it by executive order first. Democrats in the State House have announced a 24-month moratorium proposal for the 2027 session, with a 30-megawatt threshold, and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cinde Warmington has pledged a day-one executive order, per InDepthNH.

Every one of those is a promise about next year. The four town ordinances above are in force now. If you are a resident anywhere, that gap is the practical point: state-level relief runs on a legislative calendar, and your zoning board does not.

The preemption fight already happened once

The most useful thing in the New Hampshire record is the bill that died.

SB 439 was introduced by Sen. Debra Altschiller (D-Stratham) and Rep. Hope Damon (D-Croydon) to authorize cities and towns to regulate data centers in commercial and industrial zones. In the House, Reps. Diane Pauer (R-Brookline) and Keith Ammon (R-New Boston) co-sponsored an amendment that reversed it. As amended, the bill would have barred municipalities from regulating data centers more restrictively than other uses in the same district, and made them a permitted use by right in commercial and industrial zones. The House Municipal and County Government committee recommended the amended version 11-9 along party lines on May 5, NHPR reported.

Then Ammon himself moved to table it, and the House did so 304 to 11, per InDepthNH. The bill died at the June 4 adjournment. Taking it back off the table would take a two-thirds vote.

Two things travel from that. The first is that preemption arrived as an amendment to a bill local-government advocates supported — it did not arrive with its own name and its own hearing. If you are tracking a state bill because its title sounds protective, track the amendments, not the title. The second is that a 304-11 tabling vote is what it looks like when a legislature decides an industry question is politically radioactive. That is the same body whose members represent Canterbury and Nottingham.

What to take from a state with nothing built

Do not read New Hampshire as proof that towns win. Read it as a catalog of what each instrument costs and buys:

• A town-meeting zoning ban is the strongest and the hardest — it needs a ballot, and Rochester's lawyers concluded their city could not do it at all. Ask your own attorney what your state's enabling statute allows before you draft one.
• Confinement zoning — permitted in exactly one district, by conditional use permit — does the work of a ban without being one. It survives legal review better and reads as neutral on its face.
• A moratorium buys a study window and nothing else. It is worth exactly the zoning you write during it.
• Definitions are the precondition for all three.

And whichever you pursue, watch the statehouse the entire time. Every one of these ordinances would have been void under SB 439 as amended.

See also

• New Hampshire state briefing — the state's tracked pauses, utilities and officials
• National moratorium tracker — every tracked locality with its source and derived status
• Nottingham · Canterbury · Rochester — the community briefings for each town above