This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The town of Bow could be the next stop for tech giants scouring the country for sprawling open land to fuel artificial intelligence’s rising demand for computing power.
Granite Shore Power, owners of the closed Merrimack Station in Bow, have filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to enter into discussions with Eversource about making a connection to the power grid.
The April filing states that a study will seek to identify “possible adverse impacts” of connecting the project to Eversource’s system and examine “the supporting infrastructure needed to mitigate such possible impacts.”
The federal document does not specify the type of project or exactly where it would be located. But it does seek to connect a 350-megawatt project to the power grid.
A town official confirmed to the Monitor on Tuesday that there have been high-level discussions with a company about bringing a data center to Bow.
While no specific location was immediately identified, the most likely site is Merrimack Station, the former coal-fired power plant along the Merrimack River.
Importantly, it has connections to the power grid as well as access to the river for cooling, both of which are necessary resources for a large data center.
Kip McDaniel, chair of Bow’s select board and a member of the town’s planning board, would neither confirm nor deny that a company has expressed interest in building a data center in town.
“I am not at all surprised that there would be discussions of development in Bow. The town has spent 15 years trying to bring businesses into certain segments of our town that are zoned for it,” he said. “In a town with two and a half billion dollars of real estate value, that would be an absolute game changer for our town’s tax base.”
McDaniel also said that Bow is uniquely positioned for a data center, given its geographic location.
Data centers are commonly sited at former power plants because these sites have established connections to electric grids, nearby water sources and large tracts of land to support their infrastructure needs.
The Merrimack Station and its surrounding land in Bow check nearly every box for a data center. The site offers plenty of space, proximity to the Merrimack River, which would provide the water source data centers need to cool themselves, and an existing connection to the power grid.
Granite Shore Power owns 343 acres of land in that area.
William Hinkle, an Eversource spokesman, noted that the company is required by law to respond to all proposals from developers and provide information or conduct studies to determine the effect of large projects on the power grid.
“We have no role in determining whether potential projects are allowed to interconnect to our system if developers are willing to incur specific associated costs … and if those projects receive required local, state and federal approvals,” he said.
Merrimack Station was New England’s last operating coal-fired power plant before it shut down in September 2025. In its final two years, the plant rarely ran at all, firing up only during times of peak demand, like hot summer days.
“Any data center is going to go through a very robust planning process to make sure it aligns with what our town wants, and with what our ordinances say, but I think we would be remiss to not analyze this thoroughly and make a decision on the merits,” said McDaniel.
There are currently 10 data centers in New Hampshire, the highest concentration of which is clustered in Manchester, according to the tracking platform Data Center Map. None exist in Merrimack County so far.
More than 1,500 data centers are currently in development across the country, most of them slated for rural areas, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center. Discussions around new constructions have been marked by environmental concerns about water usage and noise pollution.
Hinkle said Eversource in New Hampshire has received several requests — known as Viability Assessment Agreements — similar to Granite Shore Power’s, but that theirs was the largest.
Lawmakers entertained a bill last session that would have forbidden cities and towns from regulating data centers more rigorously than any other kind of development, allowing them “by right” on any parcel zoned for commercial or industrial use. The bill, Senate Bill 439, was tabled in May, and three months later, as public sentiment continued to turn against data centers, Gov. Kelly Ayotte stated she now supports a moratorium on their construction.
At a meeting with the Portsmouth Rotary Club, the governor said that after learning of the foreseeable impact of a large data center on energy ratepayers, she concluded “it does not make sense at all to site a data center in New Hampshire,” according to reporting in the Portsmouth Herald.
Across the state, resistance to data centers has increasingly mounted.
In March, residents of Canterbury voted to ban AI companies from siting a data center in town altogether. The town, which, like many others, operates on the basis of permissive zoning, effectively preempted any future data center developments that might be proposed.
Later in May, community backlash torpedoed plans for the data center in Nottingham.
The center, proposed by businessman Tom Moulton, was imagined for the Nottingham Business Park on Route 4, a property Moulton owns.
Residents circulated a petition and turned out in droves for a meeting of the Nottingham planning board on the day that Moulton withdrew his petition. He told the New Hampshire Bulletin that he “didn’t expect” the community’s adverse reaction to his proposal “at all.”
Don Kreis, a New Hampshire consumer advocate, stated in a post on X that during a meeting between the state Department of Energy and Eversource, a company representative “let slip that they’ve been talking with a developer considering a data center of up to 200 MW in Bow.”
Granite Shore Power did not respond immediately to the Monitor’s request for comment.
David Brooks of the Concord Monitor contributed reporting.
