Servistar pitched a 2.7 million square foot hyperscale data center in Westfield that would have pulled 4–5x the city’s total peak load and 10x the state’s largest existing data center, but the project has effectively gone dark.
Despite securing major local tax breaks and benefiting from a new state sales/use tax exemption for large data centers, Servistar never filed required environmental permits, withdrew from grid interconnection studies, and has had no contact with the city since 2021.
The LLC behind the project was administratively dissolved for failing to file annual reports, and a Servistar principal has said the deal has been dead for two years due to lack of financing, undercutting the idea that AI-era demand alone guarantees capital for mega-scale builds.
Operationally, the design depended on a dedicated substation, 115 kV interconnects, on-site step-down to 34.5 kV, large diesel and natural gas backup, and major battery and load-balancing infrastructure, underscoring how power and permitting, not just land, define AI-capable data centers.
The site itself sits over an aquifer and endangered habitat, adding environmental risk and permitting friction that matter more as hyperscale and AI builds chase increasingly marginal power locations.
Servistar’s broader track record in the energy sector, including a failed electric supplier fined heavily in Connecticut, highlights counterparty risk for municipalities betting on speculative data center developers rather than established operators.
The story is a useful reality check on how fragile many headline “AI-ready” data center plans are once you dig into financing, power interconnects, environmental constraints, and sponsor quality, making the full article worth a close read.
Source: AI Hallucination? Proposed Westfield data center appears abandoned by developers – The Shoestring
