There’s no concrete proposal yet for a data center in Smithfield.
But there is a ghost town.
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A 2010 inventory of Smithfield’s historic sites described a settlement known as Hanton City, located near Fidelity Investments’ corporate campus, like this: “Was a late 17th C. farming village, now just ruins. Some is protected and some is private. Large undeveloped tract of land.”
An investment group formed by two local families takes its name from the historical site. And it wants to build a business park somewhere nearby.
“As part of that broader vision, a data center is one possible tenant that Hanton City is considering to financially catalyze the business park,” Nick Nybo, senior legal counsel for Revity Energy, a Warwick solar developer, and spokesperson for Hanton City Investments, told Rhode Island Current in an email.
The developers may receive a helping hand – or a wagging finger – from state lawmakers who, like their counterparts in other states, are debating how data centers should be regulated. But first they need to resolve an important question: What exactly is a data center anyway?
Colloquially, data centers have come to mean large facilities housing server farms needed to run generative AI. And it’s true AI initiatives have plied the most recent and most intense demand for data centers.
But pretty much every tech company and online service relies on the networking infrastructure which data centers provide. A data center can range from a server rack in a closet to the hyperscale facilities with big appetites for electricity and water being built — and fought over — across the United States. Most state-level legislation, including Rhode Island’s, aims to restrain not the closet end of that spectrum, but the gargantuan operators.
The label remains slippery in public, and even legislative understanding, as evidenced by three bills introduced in the General Assembly this session. One says data centers consume 20 or more megawatts, another says 50 or more. And a third defines data centers not by their electric consumption, but by the steps they can take to qualify for a 30-year tax break.
“I’m concerned that if we allow too much time to study this particular issue, that some of these are going to start to go in the state of Rhode Island, and it’s going to be too late for us to take action,” House Speaker Pro Tempore Brian Patrick Kennedy, a Westerly Democrat, said when introducing his bill H7331 before the House Committee on Corporations on April 7.
Kennedy’s bill has a 50-megawatt benchmark, which is roughly equivalent to the monthly energy used by about 63,500 Rhode Island homes, based on the state’s 2024 average residential consumption data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. To keep that glut of power in check, Kennedy’s bill calls for guardrails to stop data centers’ needed upgrades or infrastructure from inflicting higher costs on other ratepayers.
“No such costs shall be recovered from residential customers or from other commercial customers that are not data centers,” Kennedy said, adding that the facilities are “springing up all across the country and guzzling up electricity as well and straining the power grid.”
Warren Democratic Rep. June Speakman’s H7270 – which has a Senate duplicate sponsored by Sen. Pam Lauria, a Barrington Democrat – affords the stricter 20-megawatt benchmark for its definition of a data center. It also attempts to regulate big facilities via a more technical tweaking of ratepayer classification via the state’s Public Utilities Commission, making it as much a rate design bill as a set of safeguards.
But, as Speakman admitted during an April 7 hearing on her bill, “This bill is not ready to move to the floor.”
The PUC submitted neutral testimonies on both Kennedy and Speakman’s bills, noting that the drafts will need some revision to fit comfortably in existing statutes.
Kennedy said he’d read the PUC’s comments and responded. But data centers “seem to be going in every state,” he added. “And I would like to see us as ready as possible.”
That makes the issue of how to introduce them properly all the more pressing in the tiniest state.
“We know that data centers are proliferating in the United States, and inevitably will come to Rhode Island, probably not in a big way,” Speakman told the House Committee on Corporations. “We don’t have a lot of land on which to build them, but they will still have impacts on electricity and water. We know that we have a constrained grid.”
A third path is being led by Democratic Sen. Lou DiPalma. The Middletown lawmaker and Raytheon engineer is sponsoring a data center tax break that would sweeten developers’ interest in the Ocean State with a 30-year sales and use tax exemption.
Revity Energy, the spokesentity for Hanton City Investments’ proposed business park in Smithfield, supports it, along with a guardrails bill sponsored by DiPalma – identical to Kennedy’s in the House – to make facility operators bear the expense of grid upgrades as well as disclose their water usage.
DiPalma wants to avoid giving data center developers a blank permission slip. The tax break and safeguards should pass in tandem, he said in a recent phone interview.
“It really needs to be done as a package,” DiPalma said. “Just doing the [tax break] one…I would not recommend that.”
The Senate Fiscal office requested a fiscal note for DiPalma’s tax break bill in mid-March from the Office of Management and Budget, but the analysis had not been received as of April 10.
The House tax break bill, sponsored by Rep. David Bennett, a Warwick Democrat, remains unscheduled for a hearing.
Rep. Brian Newberry, a North Smithfield Republican who sits on the corporations committee, told Speakman he had heard the Senate debate on DiPalma’s tax break bill.
“I didn’t like what I heard,” Newberry said. “I was finding myself agreeing with people I often don’t agree with.”
Speakman compared the data center issue to solar energy. The solar industry “came before we were ready as a state,” she replied. Development, in other words, outpaced the state’s ability to regulate it effectively at an electrical or land use level.
Determining how a data center might shift costs onto ratepayers is not so easy when no specific facility exists yet, Todd Bianco, the chief economic and policy analyst at the PUC, said in a recent phone interview.
“It’s very complicated to know what impact it would have,” he said.
Bianco’s illustration of that complexity: A new large load customer can lower average costs for other customers if it helps spread existing and fixed system costs. Conversely, it may increase bills for other ratepayers if costs tied to new infrastructure are not allocated properly.
“It really depends on if they create headroom in the market or use up the headroom in the market,” Bianco said.
For now, the PUC remains neutral on the proposed bills. Bianco said that data centers’ outwardly sprawling tolls are “very project specific,” making it hard to prognosticate whether they would raise or lower costs for every other ratepayer.
“But it is possible,” he added, “to allocate costs correctly so that it doesn’t have a negative impact on other customers.”
As for the state’s electricity supplier, Rhode Island Energy submitted mostly preliminary testimony on the bills. The utility company sent its president and policy liaison to the April 7 corporations hearing to testify in person on a number of bills, albeit not the data center legislation. Nevertheless, the utility company’s president, Greg Cornett, inadvertently added something relevant to the conversation during testimony on another bill.
“It is worse in New England than it is in essentially any other part of the country except for Hawaii and California,” Cornett said of the region’s energy challenges. “The primary reason that it is a challenge in New England is because we are structurally limited. We have very limited resource capacity in the state.”
That constraint reemerged during a testimony near the end of the night. Emily Koo, Rhode Island program director for the Acadia Center, spoke in support of Speakman’s bill, arguing a 20-megawatt threshold would more comfortably fit the tiniest state than Kennedy’s 50-megawatt benchmark.
Rep. Tina Spears, a Charlestown Democrat, asked Koo why the Acadia Center, a clean energy and climate policy nonprofit, didn’t take a more hardline stance.
“We just heard Rhode Island Energy talk about supply issues,” Spears said. “So I’m a little surprised that Acadia just isn’t coming out in opposition to the bill, to the expansion of data centers.”
Koo replied that the Acadia Center was only asked to examine best practices for guardrails but will share a more formal position.
So far, all the Statehouse bills involving data centers have been held for further study after their hearings.
In the meantime, one local government is already grappling with the need to either sketch boundaries for data centers or line up barriers that would repel them outright. The ambiguity between what is and isn’t allowed shaped the discourse at the March 19 meeting of the Smithfield Planning Board.
That night, officials debated the mechanics of a proposed zoning amendment before them. The amendment would first define data centers, then ban them for at least two years in all zoning categories, with further review coming at a later date.
Planning Director Gregory Guertin described the proposal as “primarily clarifying in nature,” saying data centers are “not presently allowed as a defined use” within the town’s zoning laws anyway.
The Planning Board – after hearing from a number of concerned residents, as well as three Smithfield Town Councilors who don’t want a computing monolith in their town – ultimately voted to send the amendment to the Town Council, whose five members will take it up at their May 5 meeting.
Don’t count Town Council President John Tassoni Jr. among the supporters, however. He notes that no planning applications have yet been submitted to town officials.
“There’s no permits, there’s no anything,” he said in a phone interview before the March 19 meeting. “Did I meet with the people? Yes. Did they talk about buildings that they want to put up there? Yes. [But] they have no agreements with anybody. So I don’t know where this came from.”
A December 2025 mortgage filing shows Hanton City Investments pledged six parcels – including properties off Hanton City Trail, Hanton City Road and Route 116 – as collateral to Revity Realty and two trusts tied to project principals. The mortgage filing lists Hanton City Investments’ address in the care of Revity Energy.
Without an application before him, Town Planner Guertin said he can’t say much about the proposal’s specifics or the land it might use. On April 10, Guertin said in an email that he doesn’t anticipate the town receiving a formal proposal “for a little while.” His department usually receives preliminary questions or requests before an official submission crystallizes.
The old Hanton City area near the Fidelity Campus is overgrown, with scattered stone walls still on site.
Asked whether the proposed business park might overlap with the undeveloped space near Fidelity, Guertin replied, “I can say, with some amount of confidence, that the overall development is in that area – to what extent I am unsure.”
Revity Energy’s Nybo identified the two families involved in the Hanton City group as the Palumbos and the Brancas. Two representatives, one from each family, spoke at the March 19 Planning Board meeting, hoping to assuage residents’ fears. John Branca told the board the area’s “high tension lines” made the data center a more attractive possibility – but certainly not a done deal.
“We don’t want hysteria over a data center that may never happen,” Branca said, adding that the possibility is much less likely if the tax break legislation doesn’t pass at the State House.
After the Planning Board vote, Nybo said the Hanton group asked the town to lower its proposed, de facto data center moratorium to 90 days instead of two years, so it can “give the Town sufficient time to decide if and how data center development will be allowed in the Town.”
The Town Council is also set to meet for a “work session” on Wednesday, April 15, to hear a presentation on the business park proposal from RJB Properties, which is run by the Branca family.
Tassoni thinks the collective furor is premature and could vaporize an opportunity for the town.
“If they don’t get the bill through the General Assembly, it’s a dead issue anyway,” he said. “They’re not going to come if they’re not going to get a tax break.”
DiPalma, meanwhile, said the bills are not really about Smithfield.
“It doesn’t make a difference,” DiPalma said. “Whether it’s Smithfield or whether it’s Westerly, or whatever it is. Regardless of where it is, this is the language here. It enables.”
Alexander Castro is a staff writer for the Rhode Island Current.
