‘A big fight’ is coming over the Sutton data center. Are the Krafts ready?

Detailed summary

“This is going to be a big fight,” said Tatishe Nteta, a University of Massachusetts pollster who has studied attitudes toward data centers. “It’s a symbolic fight about the…

SUTTON — They’ve sparred with the city of Boston over stadiums (football and fútbol). They’ve battled tiny Foxborough over security fees. Recently, they’ve even found themselves at odds with the rapper Macklemore.

Now, the Kraft family is taking on what could be its ugliest fight yet: building one of the country’s largest data centers in Sutton, a bucolic Central Massachusetts town of under 10,000 people, many of whom are hell-bent on rejecting it. The $16 billion project would span 10 buildings and draw 900 megawatts of electricity — equivalent to 7 percent of the state’s peak usage on last year’s hottest summer day.

Even for the billionaire family that owns the Patriots, alongside a real estate and paper goods empire, this could hardly be a tougher fight to win, and now could hardly be a worse time to fight it.

Americans are in rare agreement on data centers: They loathe them. The Krafts — a family with a mixed record of selling local communities on mega-projects — will have to convince the seething residents of Sutton that the advertised break on their property taxes is worth a whirring, blinking set of warehouses that could raise the surrounding temperature, zap the town’s limited electricity, and suck up precious water.

“Can’t drink cash,” shouted Max Provo at a meeting here on Tuesday, as the proposal was laid out.

For some who’ve watched the Kraft family in local political tussles over the years, the data center move feels like either a major miscalculation or hubris — the idea that their will will be done, no matter how strong the local opposition. Some theorize they are pitching an enormous data center — only three larger ones are in operation — on the bet that they can compromise with the town to build a more modest one. The timing also matters; even a year ago, a proposal like this one might not have drawn such strong opposition.

“This is going to be a big fight,” said Tatishe Nteta, a University of Massachusetts pollster who has studied attitudes toward data…

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