The most complete single piece of data center reporting filed anywhere this week was Patrick Anderson's front-of-the-paper story in the Providence Journal on the proposed Hanton City campus — a roughly 500-acre site in Smithfield, Rhode Island that Digital Realty has been quietly assembling since 2023. The project is now the first real test of how Rhode Island's energy siting laws apply to a campus of this size, and the political arithmetic has shifted around it fast.
Two bills are now in the General Assembly. H7270 and S2427 would require data centers above a specified megawatt threshold to go through the state Energy Facility Siting Board rather than municipal zoning alone. EFSB review is a different kind of proceeding than a town council hearing — it applies uniform technical standards, requires formal intervenor participation, and is insulated from local campaign-finance politics in a way that Smithfield's town council process is not.
Governor Dan McKee has not taken a public position on either bill. His likely primary challenger, Helena Buonanno Foulkes, has. She came out for H7270 at a campaign event last Thursday and framed it as a test of whether Rhode Island's siting process actually works for infrastructure of this scale. That framing has national resonance: across Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana we've been watching the same argument — who has jurisdiction over a facility whose energy footprint is regional but whose land use is local. Rhode Island may be the first state where the answer arrives in the form of a primary.
What makes Anderson's piece the model for this beat: he quotes residents, the developer, the town council president, the governor's office (which declined to comment), Foulkes, and two energy-policy academics — and lets the disagreements breathe rather than flattening them into “supporters say / opponents say.” That is unusual in data center coverage right now, and it is the standard the Docket wants to point readers toward when we cite journalism we trust.