Officials in Bloomfield say a New York-based developer is proposing to build a two-story, 1 million square-foot data center on land off of Griffin Road North.
Atlas Capital Group made a presentation of what town officials say was a "conceptual proposal" to Bloomfield's Planning and Zoning Commission in June for the data center. The project would be built on a vacant piece of land at 132 Griffin Road North, according to a press release put out by the town.
The facility would include over 900,000 square feet of space for data processing and a 127,000-square-foot substation.The proposed data center would create 40 jobs.
Jonathan Colman, Bloomfield's director of land use, said the proposal is still in its early conceptual stages.
"One of the questions we want to answer is what the future reuse for this building will be when the technology becomes obsolete," Colman said.
Company officials did not respond this week to a request for comment about the plans for a data center.
The nearest homes are located to the northeast of the property that Atlas Capital is looking to develop, he said. There is also a middle school located near the area.
Colman said the next meeting between Atlas Capital and town officials will be held later this month or early in August.
The property is a former tobacco field that developers had once proposed for a shopping center that was to have been anchored by a supermarket.
Although Atlas met with Bloomfield officials, the property owner is River Bend Development CT, a Bloomfield-based limited liability company, according to Colman.
Most of the properties that are part of Atlas Capital's real estate portfolio are either in New York City or California, according to the company's web site. The majority of those properties are either residential properties or mixed use complexes.
Efforts to develop more data centers in Connecticut have been met with mixed success.
Discussions of developing data centers along the Interstate 91 corridor in Wallingford first surfaced in 2021 with a proposal for a two-story 157,000 square-foot facility on a 57-acre tract off of Williams Road in an area behind the Hilton Garden Inn in that community. The company behind that proposal, Gotspace Data LLC also building a 313,672 square foot data center on a 205-acre site on North Farms Road bordering Meriden, Tankwood Road and Route 15.
Neither project came to fruition, in part because of community opposition. In Groton, that opposition resulted in a one-year moratorium on data center projects being heard by officials in that town. But in December 2024, Wallingford's Planning & Zoning Commission voted to allow for data centers in that town's Watershed Interchange District along Interstate 91.
Data center projects have also been proposed for Groton and Waterford, with the later being proposed for land adjacent to the Millstone Nuclear Power plant.
Fred Carstensen, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Business and the director of the state Center for Economic Analysis, said one reason none of these projects have moved to the construction phase is because the state lacks a comprehensive policy governing their siting and development.
"Connecticut is falling behind in the IT economy because of this," Carstensen said. That is concerning, he added, because of projections for flat employment growth or possibly a loss of jobs in Connecticut over the next several years.
"We need more of them," Carstensen said of data centers. "New York and Massachusetts are racing ahead in this sector."
Data centers are a vital component of the digital economy because of the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. And Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has voiced support for having more data centers in the state.
But Carstensen acknowledged that there is some opposition to data centers because they consume large amounts of electricity and require large amounts of water to cool computer infrastructure inside them.
Colman said one thing Bloomifield officials want to get more information on is "what the future is for these types of buildings when the technology inside them become obsolete."