9.1.24 Proposed Waterford data center would dwarf existing Connecticut data centers

Proposed Waterford data center would dwarf existing Connecticut
data centers
Cloudsmart occupies a portion of this building in a business park on
Pin Oak Drive in Branford. Photographed Wednesday, Aug. 21,
2024. (Peter Huoppi/The Day)
August 31, 2024 3:46 pm • Last Updated: September 01, 2024 11:06
pm
By Daniel Drainville Day Staff Writer
d.drainville@theday.com
Branford ― Cloudsmart data center President Robyn Sullivan
walked down one of the nondescript office building’s barren, off-
white hallways on a late August afternoon, stopping at a door with
a sign that warned against unauthorized entry.
She pushed the door open, but did not step inside.
Beyond her, lights flashed from racks and racks of servers. Wires
ran under sections of raised flooring, eventually poking up and
feeding into them. Air conditioning hummed to combat the heat
generated by the servers.
Branford residents and town officials say they’ve had no complaints
about the data center, which was built in 2010.
Perry Maresca, economic development and business director for the
town, said hosting the data center at 4 Pin Oak Drive, inside an
industrial park, has been beneficial to the town’s economic
development, drawing in other tech companies that use its services
and generating tax revenue.
“Certainly it’s been a positive for Branford,” Maresca said.
But can this type of data center be compared with NE Edge’s

proposal to build a 1.2 million square-foot data center on the site of
the Dominion Energy Nuclear Connecticut Millstone Power Station
in Waterford?
In an attempt to draw comparisons to the Waterford project, we
looked at other data centers in the state to see how they compared
with the NE Edge proposal in terms of size, use, how they’re
powered and cooled and whether or not residents living near them
had any concerns.
In addition to Branford, data centers have existed for years in
Windsor, Trumbull, Stamford, Hartford, Norwalk and Waterbury.
In early 2023, NE Edge, led by President Thomas Quinn, began
talking with Waterford about constructing two data center buildings
and a switchyard at the Millstone site. The buildings would house
thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) that would be used
to train and operate artificial intelligence.
The discussions led to a unanimous decision by the Representative
Town Meeting and First Selectman Rob Brule to enter into a host
fee agreement with the company. The agreement set a payment to
the town of $231 million in lieu of taxes over 30 years, and set
forth guidelines on sound and environmental impact.
Concerned residents of East Lyme and Waterford, who formed a
group last summer to oppose the project, have criticized what they
say would be the data center’s impact on the environment, on
electric ratepayers and the quality of life
of residents in nearby neighborhoods. One of their chief concerns is
the noise they believe the project would create.
Quinn has said the project would be powered by 300 megawatts of
electricity from Millstone’s two operating nuclear reactors, which is
approximately 15% of the plant’s output.
None of the state’s existing data centers compare to the NE Edge
project due to its much larger size, which Quinn and industry
experts have said is necessary due to its intended use for artificial
intelligence.

NE Edge data center would be a first of its kind in the state
Data centers have existed in Connecticut at least since the 1980s,
long before Gov. Ned Lamont signed a 2021 law that promised
significant tax incentives for companies that develop data centers in
Connecticut. Only one has successfully taken advantage of the new
tax incentives ― a 153,462-square-foot Cigna data center in
Windsor.
Windsor will not receive any payment in lieu of taxes but instead
will benefit from an increase in taxable property as a result of the
upgrades, according to a host fee agreement for the project.
Cigna officials did not respond to numerous attempts to discuss the
project. Media reports on the project have not indicated if it is
being used for artificial intelligence.
The Cigna building was built in 1982 and in 2022, the company
announced it would spend $386 million to upgrade the facility and
signed a host fee agreement with the town.
Assistant Town Manager Scott Colby said the Cigna project is
“nothing in size comparison with what they’re looking at down in
Waterford,” adding residents have not spoken out for or against the
project.
“It’s not near any residential area, so it hasn’t had an impact on
anybody over there,” he added. “I think a lot of people don’t know
what it is. Plus, it’s very small.”
Data centers smaller than the NE Edge project are more common in
the state, including the 16,000-square-foot Cloudsmart. Sullivan
said the company and other existing data centers provide space to
house customers’ servers.
But in recent years, data center demand both here and nationwide
has been driven by a different technology ― the increasing appetite
for artificial intelligence, which requires immense amounts of data.
That has pushed the need for a new type of data center, ones that
need bigger buildings filled with hundreds more servers, and

require more power and cooling.
These kinds of data centers have been dubbed “hyperscale,” a term
that reflects their supersized approach to data storage. There’s no
industry-standard guidelines for what qualifies a data center as
hyperscale.
Industry experts just say they’re big, and that many such as the one
proposed by NE Edge are now being built throughout the United
States.
A traditional data center
Robyn Sullivan, president of Branford’s Cloudsmart since 2016, said
the data center was built in 2010 by a different company, RECOL.
Sullivan’s company took it over in 2016. The data center is located
within an industrial park less than 1,000 feet from Interstate 95,
where Sullivan said it shares a building with four other businesses.
Sullivan pointed out the distinction between traditional data centers
like hers and “hyperscale” ones, during last week’s tour.
In a fenced area behind the Cloudsmart building, Sullivan pointed
to approximately 10 compressor units, used to create cold air to
cool the servers inside the building, which get very hot.
The fans were spinning noisily, though it was possible to hold a
conversation within a few feet of them. Soon after leaving the
parking lot, they were barely audible, drowned out by the noise of
the nearby highway.
“A hyperscale data center, in my mind, has hundreds (of fans). It’s
like, everything’s done at such a larger, higher degree, is my
understanding,” Sullivan said.
She noted the hyperscale data centers have taken over towns like
Reston, Va., which she called “one of the data center capitals of the
United States.”
Reston, along with the neighboring city of Ashburn, is located in a

geographic zone of Northern Virginia commonly referred to as
“data center alley.”
“That place is filled with hyperscale data centers and it’s kind of
like, the hum of the town,” said Sullivan, who has been in Reston.
“Like you hear, kind of, the compressors going. There’s tons of them
in that area.”
“So that’s where you get the sound problems ― as it scales up. You
keep scaling and scaling and scaling,” she said.
Many of the data centers in Northern Virginia cool their hardware
with water. The Financial Times obtained data indicating that data
centers operated by tech giants like Amazon, Google, and
Microsoft used more than 1.85 billion gallons of water in 2023 ―
up from 1.13 in 2019.
Quinn in May said the NE Edge project would utilize outside
compressor units paired with rooftop fans.
In making the argument that the facility would be quiet, he said the
rooftop fans would be covered, and a 15-foot, insulated parapet
wall would be installed around the compressor units.
Quinn said NE Edge’s project would not use diesel generators,
which commonly contribute to the noise level, and would instead
receive its backup energy from the grid, making it quieter.
At Cloudsmart, a 500kW diesel generator would power the facility
in the event of a grid outage.
Privacy and security
Inside the Cloudsmart facility, the noise of the machinery created a
rushing kind of sound, as loud as a bus going by.
“That is a combination of obviously, servers running, but also all of
the equipment,” Sullivan explained.
She held a door open but did not allow admission into a room that
demonstrated the data center’s most popular service ― to provide a

secure space for its customers’ servers.
Sullivan added that Cloudsmart provides the power, cooling,
circuits, internet, and backup power “so that even if the customer
were to lose power, they wouldn’t lose the data, because we’re
always running.”
Sullivan closed the door, and the noise was almost fully reduced to
a dull drone, about as loud as a household air conditioning unit.
“A data center -― one of the number one things is privacy and
security,” Sullivan said. “So, we make sure that nobody that isn’t a
customer enters that space ― it protects customer data.”
“You don’t want somebody going in and grabbing someone’s
server,” she explained. “Or even grabbing, maybe, a USB out of one
of their servers and being able to take information.”
She showed an adjacent room, where there are three racks of
Cloudsmart’s own servers. The room and Cloudsmart staff provide
customers with two other valuable services.
The first is disaster recovery services.
“It’s backing up a company’s data, keeping it safe, and being able to
― if by some chance they were hit by ransomware or some other
catastrophic event ― that we could spin up their data right back to
them from the cloud,” Sullivan said.
The second is hosting of websites and emails.
Providing server space and backing up data to the cloud is not a
new technology, Sullivan said. Thus, data centers have existed to
provide these services for decades.
Residents unaware of Branford data center
A small sampling of Branford residents and town officials show no
concerns with the small data center.
Three residents living in the closest neighborhood, about a half-mile
from the data center, said they didn’t even know it existed.

Michael Scott, an architect, lives at the end of Towner Swamp Road
in Guilford, with thick woods between his home and the data
center.
“My wife and I were not aware of it,” Scott said.
The decibel reading on an IPhone app near his house in the early
afternoon was about 47 decibels ― quieter than a household
refrigerator. There was no apparent hum from the data center, but
the nearby highway could be heard.
“I would suspect that the only thing we hear is 95,” he said.
Branford First Selectman James Cosgrove said he hasn’t heard any
residents’ concerns about Cloudsmart. He added that Branford is a
small town looking to maximize its development assets, and since
being built, one benefit of the center is that it has drawn attention
from tech companies who have moved nearby to utilize its services.
“We have a lot of biotech and life science companies, lot of research
and labs, and they do rely on a lot of the data to be safely
maintained,” Maresca said. “So that is part of what they look for
when they come into town.”
Maresca said that would be something for residents to consider in
weighing the benefits of the NE Edge project ― that it would
presumably bring more tech business into town, which would result
in additional tax revenue.
“I would think it would be something that would be positive for
businesses that are there, or that are looking to come into the area,”
he added.
Norwalk, Stamford, Hartford, Waterbury data centers
Companies that operate data centers in Norwalk, Stamford,
Hartford and Waterbury could not be reached to answer questions
about their centers.
According to the website for CyrusOne, a data center developer and
operator based in Dallas, Texas, the company operates data centers

in Norwalk and Stamford. They provide similar services to the
Cloudsmart data center, space for servers for backup and business
continuity services.
The Norwalk data center, called NYM5, is a 150,000 square-foot
facility located less than 300 feet from I-95. It features 75,000
square feet of space to house servers . The amount of power it uses
is not listed on its website.
Norwalk Planning and Zoning Director Steve Kleppin said he
doesn’t know the exact year the facility was built, only that it was
approved in 2012.
“I have never heard of any issues with that facility in my eight years
here,” he said.
The Stamford data center, called NYM10, takes up 57,000 square
feet and features 20,000 square feet of server space. The amount of
power it uses is not listed in the specifications.
Stamford officials declined to discuss the project.
A Tierpoint data center in Waterbury occupies part of a five-story
office building at 108 Bank St., said City Planner Robert Nerney.
The building, built in 1883, has a total area of 35,950 square feet.
He said the company has applied for a few electrical permits for the
site, including to install a 400 kW generator on the roof. Nerney
couldn’t say how much of the building was being used for the data
center.
He said there wasn’t a lot of public focus on the use of the building
during the permitting process.
“And certainly not the public scrutiny that a 1.2 million-square-foot
building would receive in the community,” he said.
d.drainville@theday.com