DataOne, the Microsoft-linked New Jersey datacenter recently hit with a $1m fine for running unpermitted generators, emitted large amounts of health-harming air pollution for nearly a year before state regulators stepped in, according to public records obtained by Floodlight. The Vineland facility’s 62 gas-fired generators became public in August after a Floodlight/Guardian visual investigation found them operating without permits. The New Jersey department of environmental protection last week fined the company over the fleet but did not disclose how long the generators had been operating nor how much air pollution they had released into the surrounding community over the past year.
Floodlight sent technical data about the generators – obtained through public records requests – to a Rutgers professor and a former air division chief. Her analysis would rank DataOne in the state’s top five NOx polluters of 2025, per data. NOx are a dangerous group of smog-producing gases linked to asthma, heart attacks and even premature death.
It’s “the most important air pollutant in the US that affects most people”, Jin said. Longtime Vineland resident Tiffany Leone-Vespa lives about a mile from the data center and said the noise from the generators sounds like an airplane in the back of her house. Because I’ve been exposed to all of that.
My kids have been exposed to it,” she said. The site’s potential NOx emissions are even larger, according to Jin and Bruce Buckheit – a former air enforcement division chief. Both concluded that at full use, DataOne’s fleet could emit more than 1,500 tons of NOx per year.
That is nearly twice the amount that the Linden Cogeneration gas-fired power plant, New Jersey’s largest NOx emitter, is allowed to emit. Operating the generators “results in very high levels of air pollution” and the fleet’s potential emissions are “well over the regulatory threshold for a new major source”, said Buckheit. New Jersey labels any facility capable of emitting more than 25 tons of NOx per year a “major source”.
Obtaining a major source permit requires extensive environmental reviews, best available pollution controls and public comment periods – all before construction can even begin. That didn’t happen at DataOne, despite the operation being capable of emitting more than half the NOx put out by New Jersey’s entire power sector. DataOne did not respond to Floodlight’s emissions analysis.
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