The Kraft Group wasn’t the first to propose a data center in Sutton. It was a town official.

Detailed summary

Residents of Sutton expressed shock and outrage this week when they learned one of Robert Kraft’s companies had proposed building a massive data center complex in their small town…

Residents of Sutton expressed shock and outrage this week when they learned one of Robert Kraft’s companies had proposed building a massive data center complex in their small town 10 miles south of Worcester.

But the idea was first discussed in public over a year ago when Sutton’s Select Board was encouraging a packaging company owned by the Kraft Group to develop a large parcel of land it owns on the north side of town, according to videos of public town Select Board meetings reviewed by the Globe.

It’s not clear when the Krafts took up the idea, which was discussed Tuesday at a Select Board meeting. In December, a Kraft representative at a Select Board meeting said they had not formally presented any plan to Sutton officials.

But there’s no doubt its $16 billion data center plan — potentially one of the largest in the country — has crashed headlong into the powerful political backlash nationwide against the energy-hungry facilities used to develop and run artificial intelligence systems.

The 383-acre parcel has been used for industrial purposes since the 1930s, according to town filings with the Worcester County Register of Deeds. Before the Krafts owned it, it housed a cement factory and a gravel pit.

In 2022, Sutton had given the Kraft company, Unified Global Packaging Group, a tax incentive deal to build a huge warehouse on part of a 383-acre parcel it bought for $9.5 million in 2020. But by 2025, Unified told the town it couldn’t find a tenant for a warehouse and it would have to reboot its plans.

At a meeting in March of last year, then-Select Board member Normand Champigny floated some advice on attracting a new major tenant — a data center. He had a modest-size one in mind, known as a co-location facility, or colo. In the meeting video, he said they’re not like the giants: “When I think of [a big tenant], I think of, for instance, a colo like Amazon Web Services.” Amazon’s cloud computing and AI unit lease data centers all over the world.

Representatives of the…

Ea…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.