The micro data center envisioned for East Concord would be one of the first of its kind, according to the AI infrastructure company behind its design.
Levitate Inc. CEO Ryan Howard said the center’s configuration and cooling technology differ substantially from hyperscale data centers, and it is one of three his company expects to deploy across the country on a similar timetable: Pending the Concord Planning Board’s approval, Howard hopes to begin construction at 52 Locke Road before the end of the year.
“I’ve built the large, monstrous data centers, and I agree with the media. They use massive amounts of power. They are loud and, mostly, they’re using a ton of water, and that’s just not sustainable, especially as we’re heading into these long, extended droughts and we’ve got our reservoirs down at levels that, basically, our dams are getting ready to turn off,” he told the Monitor in an interview. “This is the way of the future.”
Levitate’s trio of in-progress pilot projects — one a sugar manufacturing plant conversion in Montana, the other sited on Howard’s own damson plum farm in Mill Creek, Washington — repurpose heat expelled during the process of cooling servers to warm winter sidewalks, greenhouses, soil and the data center facilities themselves. Each is a closed-loop system relying on single-phase immersion technology, submerging servers in dielectric fluid — a pool of transparent liquid that is thermally, but not electrically, conductive — to cool them instead of flushing the system with water. Levitate classifies these as “micro” data centers based on their energy consumption: 15 megawatts.
Reimagining data centers in miniature and as sources of a public amenity, rather than environmental degraders drawing enormous amounts of water and energy, is Howard’s bet on how his company can circumvent the scrutiny and ire large data centers have earned.
“We’re actually working with large hyperscalers to advise on how to modify some of the larger data centers to follow some of these trends, but we are full-force proceeding ahead. There’ll be many, many data centers to follow in this pattern,” Howard said.
In Concord, his design has already cleared preliminary milestones and is up for a public hearing before the Planning Board at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21.
In June, City Planner Kellie Caron determined that a micro data center is a permitted land use in an industrially zoned area, and that the proposal would not need to receive a variance.
Data centers are not an expressly permitted use in the city’s zoning ordinances, and when such cases arise, city staff review the operational characteristics of a facility to arrive at an administrative classification that’s comparable to a use already on the books. Caron deemed the micro data center “more appropriately classified based upon its data
processing function than as a manufacturing or warehouse use,” making it similar to computer processing and data preparation, an officially permitted use.
Northpoint Engineering, the Concord-based firm proposing the micro data center on behalf of the landowner, has made revisions to the application based on comments from city staff, according to principal engineer Jeff Lewis.
This includes shortening a proposed water line from six to four inches and clarifying that this tap to municipal water is meant to supply water to the building’s fire suppression system, the handwashing stations in the caretaker apartment and other limited domestic uses, not to cool servers.
And last week, the Conservation Commission reviewed the firm’s application for a Conditional Use Permit, which outlines plans to restore wetland buffer that Lewis explained was mistakenly cleared when the landowner hired a contractor to log the property in early 2025.
A report of wood and timber cut filed with the Concord assessing office shows that 3.5 acres of white pine, hemlock, oak, ash and beech trees were cleared from the 21-acre property in February 2025. A little more than an acre, 54,780 square feet of this deforested land, adjoined and protected wetlands on the property that Northpoint Engineering proposes planting trees, shrubs and a “conservation seed mix” to restore.
Tim Thompson, acting city planner, said it’s possible this clear-cutting should not have happened in the first place.
“Generally speaking, on any non-residentially zoned piece of property, you’re not allowed to grade, cut or do any disturbance to the earth unless you have a permit through a site plan or other permitting process,” Thompson said. “Those are typically done during the development review process, but if a property owner goes out there and does something in anticipation of developing, sometimes it becomes an issue if they do more than just cut the trees and they’re actually altering terrain.”
Lewis said Michael Trahan, owner of Granite Municipal Manufacturing and Sales, the LLC that in turn owns the parcel on Locke Road, hadn’t yet engaged his engineering firm’s services at the time of the clear-cutting.
Trahan could not be reached for comment on this story.
Disturbing wetland buffer can strip away wildlife habitat and remove obstructions that could catch stormwater runoff and prevent it from being discharged and directed toward the wetland.
“We’re trying to be proactive about that and acknowledge that and come up with a replanting plan,” Lewis said in an interview. “It’s a pretty straightforward site plan from our perspective. Small footprint, and you know, there’s no traffic from this. There’s really nothing that you’d normally be concerned about other than this kind of PR issue of being a data center.”
Lewis is a sitting member of the conservation commission and recused himself when the body reviewed the application’s conditional use permit last week.
All told, the restoration plan includes replanting more than 700 plants in the buffer zone, according to Randall Shuey, the Northpoint wetland and soil scientist who prepared the plan.
The public hearing is the next step in the development process.
For the last 30 years, Thompson has been a part of the American Planning Association, which he said has been avidly discussing the question of behemoth data centers and how town and city planners can respond — but he wasn’t sure if a micro data center warrants applying that playbook.
“There are these massive AI-related data centers that require hundreds of megawatts of power and millions of gallons of water for cooling purposes, where you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of square feet of data center,” he said. ‘This one was fairly unique, and until this type of application came forward, I don’t know that this in another era would have been called a data center, given its relatively small scale and size.”
What remains consistent across the board is that these developments, in essence storage facilities built for housing servers, promise to return extravagant revenues for their owners.
The micro data center proposed for Locke Road would total 8,160 square feet, with approximately 7,220 square feet of that footprint to be utilized as data center space, according to the project narrative. Howard, the Levitate CEO, said that with some space reserved for walkways and ancillary equipment, as many as 1,000 servers will occupy between one-quarter and one-third of the building.
Tenant clients will purchase servers and pay Trahan and Granite Municipal Manufacturing and Sales to lease data center space with a base monthly rent charged per kilowatt hour. And for its owner, a facility operating at a capacity of 15 megawatts, like the one in Concord, can generate $30 million in yearly revenue according to Howard’s estimates.
“It’s significant,” Howard said. “I don’t know if I can disclose the actual number that this data center would bring in, but in general, if you’re at roughly 15 megawatts, you’re looking about a little more than double that in revenue on a yearly basis. So, they are, you know, highly profitable.”
The Concord Planning Board meets in City Council chambers at 37 Green Street.
