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☀️Sunny with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:49 p.m.
A judge in Lowell ruled that the owners of a data center in Lowell can’t install four new diesel generators there while a case brought by neighbors challenging the expansion makes its way through the legal process. The data center is the largest of its kind in Massachusetts and has been there since 2015 at the site of a Prince pasta factory that had sat vacant since the 1990s. But with AI products driving up demand for data centers, there’s been more scrutiny of the center recently. In the lawsuit, neighbors and their representatives said the generators would harm air quality in the densely populated neighborhood around the data center.
“Communities shouldn’t have to race against construction while they are challenging whether a project was properly approved,” said Adam Reynolds, environmental justice fellow at Conservation Law Foundation and one of the lawyers representing residents in this case. “Lowell residents have watched this facility grow around their homes for years while their concerns went unanswered.” GBH’s Jeremy Siegel has more on this ruling here. Keep reading for a deeper look at how this data center came to be and what it’s like inside.
Four Things to Know
1. Robert Gilman, a 32-year-old man who grew up in Dracut and has spent the last four years in a Russian prison, is back in the U.S. Russian authorities arrested Gilman in 2022 and accused him of beating a police officer. They later extended his sentence after accusing him of attacking prison officials. U.S. State Department officials said Gilman was being wrongfully imprisoned, and his family has been sounding the alarm on how much his health deteriorated in prison.
“The Russians treated my brother so badly,” said his sister, Lexie Hudson. “They hurt him for no reason, other than that he was both an American and a Marine. What did they get out of this? Why did they do this to such a wonderful person?” She thanked President Donald Trump and Sen. Ed Markey for leading the efforts to free her brother.
2. Arts organizations in Massachusetts lost $11.4 million from 42 federal grants last year. They also saw a decrease of $869,730 in state funding, $669,000 less from foundations and $553,329 less from donors.
That means about 720 people lost their jobs in the local art world, said Emily Ruddock, executive director of MASSCreative. “We’re talking about programs that support rural communities, urban communities, low-income communities, BIPOC communities,” she continued. “These are folks that wouldn’t normally have access if it weren’t for federal dollars that act as a catalyst to make sure that these things can happen across New England.”
3. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said she’d support at least two of the nine ballot questions this November: Question 1, which would expand the state’s public records law to include the Legislature and governor’s office; and Question 4, which would allow eligible voters to register to vote on Election Day.
“I haven’t taken positions yet, and I may or may not, on all of the ballot questions,” Campbell said. “But when I was on the [Boston] City Council, obviously, some of these issues appeared then. So there was expansion of public records requests, same-day voter registration — I supported [these] in the past and I have not changed.”
4. People from the Nantucket Land and Water Council are giving some owners of small boats new moorings that float above the sea floor instead of sinking into it. The idea is to keep anchors and chains from damaging places where eelgrass grows.
“This is a way for boat owners to help save the harbor and its most critical plant and still get to keep their boats — same spot, same setup. Everything from the waterline up is the same,” said Nantucket Waterkeeper RJ Turcotte.
In one Mass. city, the fight over a data center has hit a crisis point
In Lowell, by the River Meadow Brook and between the neighborhoods of Sacred Heart and Back Central, amid three-deckers and other multifamily homes, there’s a 352,000- square-foot building that looks like a black box.
“No one ever knew what it was,” Amada Moundele, who grew up in Lowell and is now a member of the city’s Party for Socialism and Liberation, told Jeremy Siegel, host of GBH’s In Common: News from the Berkshires to the Bay. “You would literally see it, and you’re like, ‘What is that?’”
That box is a data center owned by a company called the Markley Group. When you upload a photo to the cloud or ask generative AI software to answer your question or generate an image, that work is done in a data center like this one. It holds computers that need electricity and cooling to function.
And people who live around it told Siegel that data centers don’t make good neighbors. They’re worried about noise, air pollution, and their electric and water bills going up.
“The people of Lowell do not want this data center,” Moundele said.
Siegel got to tour the facility: a hallway where employee portraits hung, its power center and some diesel generators the company wants to use during power outages. “When you think about your daily life, how many things you do online — whether it be mobile banking, streaming a video, sending a text message — all of those basic, small things that you do every day that you don’t think about, that requires a data center,” said Jaclyn Casey, a marketing manager for Markley.
You can tour the neighborhood, hear about the case and peek inside the data center here.
Dig deeper:
-‘A destroyer of our community’: Tensions over data centers in Massachusetts
-From smart meters to banning influencers: It’s a sign of the times in Massachusetts
-AI-generated biological viruses? MIT expert says it’s both a worry and an opportunity for medicine
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