Four Groups Counted New Jersey's Data Center Bans. They Got 37, 38, 50 and 69.

Three New Jersey towns banned data centers on the same night in late August. That is now an ordinary week here. It raises a question a resident three weeks from a zoning vote actually needs answered: how many towns have done this, and is mine one of them?

Four organizations published a count in the last two weeks of August. They got 37, 38, "more than 50," and 69.

None of them is wrong, exactly. They are counting different things. Working out why is more useful than any of the four numbers, because the same ambiguity is sitting inside your own town's ordinance, and it is the first thing a developer's attorney will go looking for.

The four counts

• 38. The Climate Revolution Action Network's tally, reported by 94.3 The Point on August 27, which made Jackson "the 38th New Jersey community" to act.
• ~38. datacenterbans.com, a national tracker built by Will Manidis and last updated August 28, counts "roughly 38 municipalities that have blocked data centers by local ordinance, the most of any state."
• More than 50. Charlie Kratovil of Food and Water Watch, quoted by Patch the night East Brunswick acted: "East Brunswick now joins more than 50 other New Jersey communities in taking this action."
• 69. The Pinelands Preservation Alliance's tracker: "As of August 27, 2026, the following 69 New Jersey municipalities have banned data centers."

Our own moratorium tracker carries 67 New Jersey localities — 62 recorded as enacted, five as proposed. That is the most of any state; nationally we have 317 enacted rows across 37 states.

We should be equally honest about the soft part of our own number. Forty of those 67 New Jersey rows are sourced to the Pinelands list itself, with no ordinance number and no adoption date we have read. They carry the date we read the list, not the date the town acted. That is a weaker claim than our rows for Stafford or East Brunswick, and the tracker marks them as such.

Why the counts diverge

Three reasons, all of which matter for your town.

A ban, a moratorium and a zoning amendment are not the same instrument. Stafford Township's Ordinance 2026-22, reported by Patch, says it plainly: "All data centers are hereby prohibited from operating anywhere in the Township of Stafford." East Brunswick's Ordinance 26-21 does something narrower — Patch reported it defines data centers and makes them a prohibited use in all commercial, business and industrial zoning districts. Both get counted as bans. Only one is a blanket prohibition on its face, and the difference is exactly where an application in a district nobody listed would go.

Introduced is not adopted. Jersey City introduced a ban in July; our tracker still carries it as proposed, along with Howell, Andover, North Plainfield and Plainfield. A count that includes introductions runs ahead of a count that waits for second reading. The Inquirer reported in early August that Collingswood had a data center ban headed for final passage in early September. We have not confirmed the outcome, so we are not counting it, and neither should you until you see the adopted text.

Documentation costs time. The largest count is also the one with the least per-town paperwork: most entries on the Pinelands list carry no ordinance number. That is not a knock on a tracker doing more than anyone else in the state. It is a warning about what happens to an undocumented number once it is repeated in a council chamber.

The number is not your argument. The ordinance is.

If you stand up and say sixty-nine New Jersey towns have banned these, expect to be asked which ones — and expect the applicant's attorney to have read three of them and found one that only regulates building height.

The stronger move is to bring a single ordinance, ideally from a town that resembles yours, and read the operative sentence out loud. Ask your clerk for five things: the ordinance number, the adopted text rather than the introduced draft, the zoning districts it covers, the effective date, and whether any pending application was grandfathered. That last one decides everything.

What a ban actually stops

Three New Jersey cases, in increasing order of how much the ban accomplished.

Vineland: the wave arrived after the vote. On August 18 the Vineland planning board approved the site plan for the second phase of a 300 MW campus being built by DataOne for Nebius, whose capacity there is tied to a Microsoft deal WHYY described as worth 17 billion dollars. WHYY reported a six-hour hearing attended by a couple hundred people, that nobody spoke in favor during public comment, and that the 8–1 approval drew boos from the room. Phase one was already under construction. A citywide ban passed this month would not touch any of it. See our Vineland briefing.

Millville: a ban against a proposal never formally filed. The Board of Commissioners banned data centers citywide on May 19, which News 12 reported killed the A1 Data Center, describing it as a 2.6 million square foot facility that would have drawn 1.4 GW at full capacity. The developer's own master plan page advertises the site at 1300 Wheaton Avenue as a "66-acre master-planned development" with "2.9M SQ FT of optimized technical space," a "1.4 GW" scale horizon, "49 MW Live redundant substation energy" today, and a five-acre freshwater cooling pond. Note that the two square-footage figures do not match: 2.6 million from the newsroom, 2.9 million from the developer. Cite whichever you want, but say whose number it is. Our project dossier records that no site plan was ever formally submitted to the city — which is worth knowing before you describe the ban as having stopped a project that was, on the public record, still a marketing page. See our Millville briefing.

Monroe Township and Andover: banned, then sued. Monroe adopted a township-wide ban on April 22 that reached previously approved projects. On June 5, Hexa Builders filed a 104-page, 20-count complaint in Gloucester County Superior Court seeking 300 million dollars, later removed to federal court in Camden. Among the counts is a First Amendment theory: per the Jersey Vindicator's reading of the filing, Hexa argues data centers are used "in sending email and text messages, using social media, storing data to be retrieved from internet-based searches," so restricting them burdens speech. Monroe's attorney, Todd Gelfand, moved to dismiss on July 28, arguing the ban is ordinary land-use regulation and that a township has a right to amend zoning in response to public objection; the Inquirer reported that U.S. District Judge Edward Kiel had not ruled as of early August. Andover Township drew a separate suit on July 10, when National Land Developers — which holds 248 Stickles Pond Road — asked the Sussex County court to void Ordinance 2026-13, alleging defective notice and an arbitrary Land Use Board review. WRNJ reported township officials said they intend to defend and have no interest in settling.

Neither suit has produced a ruling. That is the point. For a town with a live application, a ban is the start of the fight, not the end of it — and a town that acts before an application lands is in a materially stronger position than one that acts after.

The state layer

Municipal bans are not New Jersey's only lever. On July 7, Gov. Sherrill signed the Data Center Fair Share Act (S731/A796), which the governor's office describes as creating "a new ratepayer class and rate structure for data centers, ensuring they pay for their own energy use and associated grid infrastructure," and requiring large loads to "cut back before residential ratepayers are impacted" when the grid is strained. A town that cannot get a ban through can still make the cost-shifting argument the state has now written into law.

See also

• New Jersey state page — every tracked locality, project and ban in the state
• Moratorium tracker — 317 enacted rows across 37 states, each with its own source and read date
• Project tracker — the Vineland, Millville, Monroe and Andover dossiers, with the permit paper trail for each