Hexa Builders wants a federal judge to overturn Monroe Township’s prohibition and award the company $300 million.

When a developer challenged a South Jersey town’s blanket ban on data centers, lawyers for the company adopted a novel legal argument: The prohibition violates the First Amendment because it restricts important electronic communications.

Princeton-based Hexa Builders did not claim in its sprawling, 20-count lawsuit against Monroe Township in Gloucester County that officials had directly restricted the company’s speech.

Instead, Hexa’s lawyers argued that data centers transmit ideas and expression, and that restricting them would “impose a significant burden on the free speech rights of all citizens in the United States.”

“Data centers are used in sending email and text messages, using social media, storing data to be retrieved from internet-based searches, and much more,” Hexa’s lawyers wrote. “Future use of AI could impact even more forms of communication, and a data center, at its very core, involves computers literally communicating with each other.”

Constitutional law scholar and Rutgers Law School professor Ronald Chen told The Jersey Vindicator that the argument is a long shot. But if a court accepted it, he said, the decision could have extraordinary consequences for local governments’ ability to regulate infrastructure connected to electronic communications.

“If it opened that door, virtually every utility or anything that could possibly be used to facilitate communication — however indirectly or remotely — would be imbued with First Amendment protections,” Chen said. “That would make local government impossible.”

Hexa filed the 104-page lawsuit June 5 in Gloucester County Superior Court. Monroe later moved the case to U.S. District Court in Camden.

The developer accused township officials of banning data centers in response to public opposition even though the Planning Board had previously approved Hexa’s project at 3043 Black Horse Pike.

Hexa planned to build two warehouses at the site: one measuring about 522,000 square feet and another measuring about 1.1 million square feet. The company planned to eventually convert the larger building into a data center.

Residents criticized the proposal during a Jan. 8 meeting of the Monroe Planning Board, saying they did not want data centers in their community. Board members nevertheless approved the project that night and memorialized their decision in a Feb. 2 resolution, Hexa’s lawyers said.

At the same time, Monroe Township Council members were moving in a different direction.

During their Jan. 28 meeting, council members directed the planning board to develop stricter standards governing the construction and operation of data centers, citing residents’ opposition.

Hexa said it worked with the board and remained “ready, willing and able to abide by the proposed standards.”

But residents continued to object at public meetings, and council members moved two months later to ban data centers altogether.

“We are here as elected officials this evening, saying that we’re going to do everything in our power to stop all data centers from coming here,” Mayor Gregory Wolfe said during a March 25 meeting, according to the lawsuit.

Wolfe also said township officials planned to “deny any applications for that use” and “block any data centers from coming until we can get an ordinance in place.”

Council members adopted the ban April 22 and applied it throughout the township, including to previously approved projects such as Hexa’s.

Planning Board members rejected the company’s application the following month, deeming it incomplete. Hexa sued weeks later.

The company accused Monroe officials of violating the First and 14th Amendments and several state laws. Hexa wants a judge to declare the ban unconstitutional, overturn the Monroe Planning Board’s rejection of its application, and award the company $300 million in damages.

Neither Wolfe nor any member of the Monroe Township Council responded to The Vindicator’s requests for comment. Hexa’s attorneys also did not respond.

Chen said he would be surprised if the First Amendment claim succeeded because data centers merely carry communications rather than produce speech themselves.

“The data center is not speaking. It’s not generating content,” Chen said.

Courts generally scrutinize government actions that regulate the content of speech, Chen said. He does not believe Monroe’s ban does that.

“I don’t think a court would think the First Amendment is implicated in any meaningful way here,” he said. “This is one of those, ‘Run it up the flagpole and see if anything comes loose.’ But there’s nothing there.”