Data centers in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire: 1 project mapped

Imagery: Esri, Maxar

No large data center has been proposed in Hillsborough County. Its data centers are small ones that rent server space to businesses. The best known is FirstLight's at 8 Commerce Drive in Bedford, 7,250 square feet inside a three-story office building, which ColoSpace opened around 2006 and FirstLight bought in 2019. In March 2026 FirstLight added about 25 percent more space there, with power and cooling for up to 100 more racks of servers.

Power is the barrier to anything bigger. Eversource, the state's largest utility, received data center requests adding up to 1,500 megawatts of power in the fall of 2025, while New Hampshire's own plants produce about 4,500 megawatts, roughly half of what the state uses. Eversource engineering chief Digaunto Chatterjee said a very large data center would need to sit near generators and high-voltage lines, most of them in the Manchester-Nashua-Portsmouth triangle. "You have a system that is stable. Don't mess it up is what I'm getting at," he told NH Business Review.

Two local legislators split on a 2026 bill, House Bill 1265, to pause large data center construction while the state studies it. "We have a drought in New Hampshire and we need to put up guardrails in front of the train," said Rep. Wendy Thomas, D-Merrimack. Rep. Carry Spier, D-Nashua, noted that small data centers in Bedford, Manchester and Salem do not cause the problems the bill's sponsor described. Gov. Kelly Ayotte has said she will propose a statewide data center moratorium in her next budget.

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.