Data centers in Hartford County, Connecticut: 2 projects mapped

Imagery: Esri, Maxar

The data center actually moving through permits in Hartford County is small: a 4-megawatt, fuel-cell-powered computing building on the former Dodge Village car dealership site at 234 Riverside Avenue in Bristol, beside the Pequabuck River. The developer, ReNew Riverside LLC, belongs to Colchester-based ReNew Developers, whose chief executive John Matheson told the Hartford Business Journal in February that Connecticut's only viable data centers are "smaller, lower-impact facilities" that make their own power. The state Siting Council approved the fuel cell in December 2022. Bristol had no zoning category for data centers until its Zoning Commission adopted one in November 2025, opening a path for them in some business and industrial zones. The Inland Wetlands Commission approved the project in April 2026. Mayor Ellen Zoppo-Sassu wrote in April that the building, about 15,000 square feet, would use closed-loop cooling with city water, draw nothing from the river, and install noise monitoring. Matheson said construction was targeted to start in summer 2026, with operations the following year.

Not everyone in Bristol is convinced. A March commentary in The Bristol Edition said the 1.62-acre plan, which it put at 27,000 square feet, would run continuously on a flood-prone riverfront the city is trying to turn into a walkable corridor, with a streetscape rebuild planned as soon as 2027 and the former J.H. Sessions factory becoming housing. It raised questions about storm risk, fuel storage, noise and light. Zoppo-Sassu, who says the project began under the previous administration, argued that it is edge computing rather than a hyperscale campus, and that big data centers "won't be located in Connecticut any time soon" because of the state's power costs. The city's public works director has suggested updating Bristol's noise ordinance to cover the low-frequency hum of generators.

Bigger ideas in the county have stalled on paper. In June 2025 New York-based Atlas Capital Group showed Bloomfield's Planning and Zoning Commission a concept for a two-story data center of about 1 million square feet, with a 127,000-square-foot substation, on a 44.5-acre former tobacco field at 132 Griffin Road North. Commissioners called it "worthy of consideration", but by February 2026 no formal application had been filed. The only applicant to the state's 2021 data center tax incentive program is Bloomfield-based Cigna, for a roughly $380 million upgrade of its Windsor data center. A New Britain proposal pairing a data center with a fuel cell had advanced only on the power side. Gov. Ned Lamont said in February that the state would "slow down new data centers, unless they add more generation as well," and a legislative committee floated repealing some of the tax incentives. What happens next: construction in Bristol if the remaining permits come through, and a formal application in Bloomfield, if Atlas files one.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.