DataOne Vineland, LLC has secured planning board approval to expand its hyperscale AI campus in Vineland, Cumberland County, New Jersey, a facility built to suit AI cloud provider Nebius Group and tied to a five-year, $17.4 billion computing agreement with Microsoft that can expand to $19.4 billion. The story was first reported by NJ.com and has since been covered by WHYY, Fox29, the Foreign Policy Journal, and TipRanks.

The Vineland Planning Board voted 8-1 around August 18-19, 2026 to approve the Phase 2 expansion and amended site plan, clearing the project's most significant regulatory hurdle to date. Phase 1, a 129,622-square-foot AI data center building, is already under construction and nearing completion. The newly approved Phase 2 adds a 587,980-square-foot two-story expansion, a 92,466-square-foot chiller building, an 8,660-square-foot LNG tank and filling station, and a water treatment plant, all on a roughly 106-acre former sand-mining site off South Lincoln Avenue.

Power comes primarily from behind-the-meter Bloom Energy fuel cells, with Bloom contracted for approximately 328MW of fuel-cell capacity delivering around 250MW of guaranteed power, supplemented by onsite natural-gas systems and LNG infrastructure. The campus runs largely independent of the local electric grid. One regulatory complication remains: the city issued at least two stop-work orders for portions of the power infrastructure built without permits. Those elements cannot resume until proper permits are obtained, even though the core site-plan approval is now in place.

Nebius Group is an AI cloud provider listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS. The company operates GPU clusters and server racks as a service for AI workloads. The DataOne Vineland campus is structured as a build-to-suit arrangement in which DataOne develops and owns the physical infrastructure while Nebius operates the compute inside it, backed by its Microsoft computing agreement.

The planning board hearings ran past 11 p.m. with extensive expert testimony and public comment, and the vote drew visible community opposition. NJ.com reported residents responding to the approval with outrage, capturing the tension in its headline. Opposition centered on the scale of the project, its power infrastructure, and the stop-work orders already issued on portions of the site. The 8-1 approval reflects a board majority persuaded by the economic case, but the stop-work orders and permit disputes leave some construction activity in a holding pattern.

Cumberland County's labor base is rooted in agriculture, food processing, glass and sand manufacturing, and light industrial operations. That history produces experienced electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, and heavy-equipment operators whose skills transfer directly to large-scale MEP and civil work on a hyperscale campus. Nearby Millville and Bridgeton have hosted glass plants and food-processing facilities for decades, and New Jersey's IBEW, UA, and operating-engineer locals cover South Jersey projects of this size.

The most unusual staffing demand here is not the data-center work. It is the power plant inside the fence. Approximately 328MW of Bloom Energy fuel cells, an LNG tank and filling station, onsite natural-gas systems, and a water treatment plant constitute a process-industrial job site layered on top of a hyperscale construction site. Filling those roles means recruiting from regional power plants and industrial gas operations, not only from the data-center contractor community. Workers with fuel-cell installation, process-gas, and utility-scale mechanical and electrical backgrounds are not a standard feature of most MEP subcontractor rosters.

Compensation benchmarks for the operations roles that follow construction reflect that complexity. Commissioning engineers on AI-scale campuses in the region typically earn around $147,000 annually. Critical-facilities engineers range from $117,000 to $147,000 depending on scope and certification. Recruiters filling data-center trades in this corridor are also competing against major warehouse, pharma, and logistics builds along the I-295 and New Jersey Turnpike corridors near Camden and Gloucester counties, where demand for the same skilled trades is already running hot. For a detailed breakdown of roles, pay bands, and where the talent is concentrated, see our guide to hiring data center talent in Vineland, New Jersey. Sources: NJ.com, which first reported the planning board vote, with additional coverage from WHYY, Fox29, the Foreign Policy Journal, and TipRanks.