The AI Boom Has Plunged a Small Pennsylvania Town Into Chaos

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

By Rebecca Egan McCarthy, Grist

“I don’t like to see anyone upset,” said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School’s auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to town. “However,” he said. “I think that this is the best data center site in this area of the country, by far.” The audience had been fairly quiet, bundled in thick coats against the late January cold. But as Farris spoke about data centers as a boon for communities, they began to laugh, drawing a rebuke from town officials.

“What about the children?” someone shouted from the crowd. The children were watching from the walls; long banners of Valley View Performing Arts students hanging around the auditorium like championship pennants. Project Scott and four other data facilities will sit just a few thousand feet from the middle and high schools.

“Isn’t there a missile plant next door?” Farris said, getting aggravated. He was referring to Lockheed Martin’s 350,000-square-foot Missiles and Fire Control facility directly next to the high school, parts of which are highly contaminated.

“That sucks too!” another attendee yelled back. This was nothing to worry about, Farris tried to convince the audience. This would bring in tax revenue, he said. It was just an office park, albeit one with roughly 450 diesel backup generators.

“It’s going to be away from everyone,” Farris kept repeating, to rising jeers. He was wearing a knit turtleneck with a large American flag emblazoned across the chest. “It’s not going to bother anyone.”

The specifications say something different: Five developers are planning to build six data center campuses in Archbald, which will cover a full 14 percent of the town, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. One campus alone, as The Scranton Times-Tribune reporter Frank Lefneskey pointed out, is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce.

Pennsylvania has become an epicenter of the data center boom in the United States, with over 50 campuses in development. Eleven of them are slated for Lackawanna County alone. Archbald, with six campuses composed of 51 massive buildings, has the most of any municipality in Pennsylvania.

Despite the public outcry, it has been surprisingly difficult to learn what Archbald’s elected officials think of the massive industry moving in. None of the town’s seven council members responded to my emails, so I stopped by the borough administration building in person a few weeks before Christmas, and was told to wait in the lobby while they held an informal closed meeting in council chambers. When the door opened, it was clear that anyone who actually had the power to make or break the data center plans had quietly filed out the back, leaving me with Archbald’s unelected borough manager, Dan Markey, who essentially runs the town, but cannot vote for or against development.

What did he think about artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the idea that eventually these efforts will produce something like a “computer god” capable of solving climate change, ending hunger, revealing the full breadth of science, and performing any number of other miracles? “I believe in one God, and it’s not a computer,” Markey told me evenly. By now, hundreds of towns across the country have been caught up in the rush to build large language models that can parse unfathomable amounts of data to write copy, answer any query, develop new vaccines, and likely render a large number of jobs obsolete. That rush accelerated into an all-out arms race over the past year. What it means in practice is an enormous amount of data centers — enough to approximate a minor deity and enough, as OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever once speculated, to “cover the Earth.” Markey told me he had ChatGPT on his phone, but didn’t use it much.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to see the world covered in data centers,” Markey said. “[But], according to Pennsylvania law, we have to have a zone for everything. An adult bookstore, a strip club, a concrete and asphalt plant — anything that wants to come here. We have to have a zone for it. If it’s not zoned, it’s allowed to go anywhere.”

In most states, towns have the right to exclude businesses that they find disagreeable — a wealthy suburb, for example, would likely reject a landfill or gas plant — but in Pennsylvania, towns must allocate some patch of land to these “undesirable industries.” Some municipalities deal with this by forming what are called zoning collaboratives, which allow them to plan as a region for pollution. One town might get data centers, another gas plants, another a landfill. Markey approached the nearby boroughs of Blakely and Dickson City to discuss the possibility, but the data center development rush has outpaced him.

Whatever’s attracting data centers to the area, it’s forced Markey to answer for a rush of development, unprecedented since the town was settled in the 1840s in service of an industry that will bring vanishingly few jobs. Residents kept bringing up the threat of collapse — the network of empty mine shafts running underground, the town beneath the town, the structural instability that would accompany these massive buildings. The data centers would drive bears into town, they said, rattlesnakes into yards, and without trees to stabilize them, the mountains themselves would begin to crumble, sending landslides into the valley.

“I just try to listen, and I try to separate the valid concerns from the things that just sound like the sky is falling,” said Markey. “I was approached at a gas station a couple months ago and was told that I was going to kill everyone who lived in Archbald. I don’t think that’s valid. I don’t think that’s a reasonable argument to have with me.”

But the anger and suspicion directed towards town officials, incoming tech companies, and a powerful local businessman with reported mafia connections show no signs of abating. The AI rush is often spoken of in terms of grand harms or potential social goods that feel entirely divorced from the way it’s playing out on the ground — as an unmitigated mess, breeding confusion, paranoia, and fury.

Millions of years ago the Lackawanna Valley was an intertidal zone: swamp land bordering a shallow sea that stretched out to Central Pennsylvania. That sea was forced skyward as the African and North American continents collided, raising the mountains from the earth and crumpling and compressing the valley’s dying plant life in tight laminations, until it finally hardened into what’s considered the gold standard for coal — smokeless, slow-burning anthracite.

Anthracite is rare: Almost 90 percent of the world’s recoverable deposits lie buried in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and it represents only 1 percent of global coal stocks (the majority being the soft, sooty bituminous coal that you find in the western half of the state and across West Virginia), but it was the most in-demand fuel for household heating for over a century. Its discovery brought a rush of mining companies to the region, transforming the Lackawanna Valley from a mass of overgrown forest into a crucial coal production and transportation hub for New York and Philadelphia’s energy markets.

Coal patch towns — in which everything, the stores, the schools, the houses, were owned by coal companies — sprang up across the valley. Scranton became known as the “Electric City,” with the region’s bountiful fuel reserves powering some of the first street lamps and electric trolleys. The economic boom was short-lived though. Oil quickly outpaced coal, and a devastating flood in the 1960s effectively ended the industry, by which time the region was so thoroughly hollowed out that the Pennsylvania secretary of mining warned the city of Scranton “was sitting on toothpicks” and would be more cost-effective to abandon than reclaim.

The drive into Archbald is especially beautiful in fall — gently rolling hills covered in foliage, rivers winding lazily past clapboard houses — but winter brings a low, fixed gray sky and a perpetual blanket of snow. Without the forgiving cover of leaves, it’s easier for the old industrial history to lurch into view. The ground gives way occasionally, and huge, black mountains of mining waste called culm (pronounced “column”) dot the landscape.

By now, the culm piles are covered in vegetation and appear almost natural, but you can tell something is off if you look closely — their slope is too abrupt; their backs covered by spindly, young trees, slipping downhill. They’re enormous health hazards, sending fine particulate matter into the surrounding neighborhoods and leeching toxins into the groundwater, but they’ve become familiar enough, a woman named Tiffany told me, that people hike on them and kids play on them. We were at the end of her block, looking up at a massive culm pile. “I’ve never walked back there,” she said. “It’s kind of creepy.”

The land on the other side of the heap has been sold to Project Gravity, whose developers intend to build seven 138,000-square-foot buildings along Eynon-Jermyn Road. It will be bordered by two more data center campuses, known as Project Scott and Project North; across the road will be yet another campus called Project Boson. Further down Eynon-Jermyn Road is the Wildcat Ridge AI Center. Tiffany lives just over the town line in Jermyn, meaning she won’t benefit from the increased tax income, nor can she voice an opinion at the Archbald town meetings, even though the data centers are effectively in her backyard.

I’d met Tiffany a few months earlier in a nearby park, along with other members of a fast-growing group of locals fighting the new developments. I’d reached out to them through the Stop Archbald Data Centers Facebook group, which now has over 5,000 members, equal to nearly two-thirds the size of the town. Local opposition to data centers has swept the nation this year, with concerns over rising electricity costs, reliance on fossil fuels, excess water use and noise, pollution, and their placement in or near residential areas. These fights have forged unlikely political alliances and will potentially imperil incumbents come this year’s midterm elections. According to a Financial Times analysis, at least 370 measures to regulate the AI industry were introduced in state legislatures this past year, and roughly 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats believe the industry needs more regulation.

“We moved from a couple towns over and built a new house, thinking this was a good place to go,” said Archbald resident Ann Beynon, who grew up by a Superfund site in nearby Throop. She’d been looking to settle down somewhere in the area where her kids wouldn’t be at risk of lead poisoning. There was a landfill in Throop and a gas plant in Jessup. “And now this is happening” in Archbald, she said while gathered in the park.

Tiffany, Ann, and the others had brought maps to our meeting to demonstrate the scale of the problem. They were not, they explained, asking for the data centers to leave entirely — they just wanted them confined to industrial zones. They felt town council members were unprepared and ill-informed on this issue, ready to jump at the prospect of tax money without looking at the long term implications. When the first data centers began to arrive in early 2025, Archbald’s zoning code classified them as roughly on par with commercial office buildings, allowing them to be built in some commercial zones. Residents fought back, demanding new zoning laws that would limit data centers to fully industrial areas away from the center of town, but the updated zoning ordinance passed last November wouldn’t go that far. Instead, they still allow facilities to be built next to residential neighborhoods — such as the Highlands, a condo complex occupied largely by retirees, and a trailer park called Valley View Estates, whose owner has agreed to sell the land to a data center developer. Residents are set to be evicted next month, on April 15.

“These people have no resources,” said Beynon. “They can’t just get up and move — they’re really scared.”

Developers moved to purchase land before the ordinance went into effect, leaving Archbald with little recourse to stop them, said Brigitte Meyer, an attorney at PennFuture, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization. Meyer has been sounding the alarm for a year now, warning municipalities across Pennsylvania that if they don’t get out in front of the data center boom, they could be overrun.

“The tragic irony is that it’s really hard to get the community activated at this on the front end, when things are more hypothetical,” she said. “People’s interest gets piqued when there’s a specific proposal. But by the time it gets to that point, the period has already passed where the municipality has the most power to actually affect how that’s going to go.”

Valley View Estates isn’t far from Tiffany’s house, just up Eynon-Jermyn Road. Residents received their eviction notice last July, shortly after Project Gravity was announced. The facilities would cover the surrounding woods; more buildings would replace the junkyard down the street. They were hemmed in, and the park owner wanted out. When reports of the eviction hit local news, “people were so horrible,” said Matthew Bucksbee, a Valley View resident. “One of the kids that commented, he’s like ‘Yeah, just get rid of that place, it’s infested with drugs.’”

Many residents, Bucksbee’s fiancée, Candace May, explained, are disabled or caretakers for disabled relatives; many don’t even have cars and subsist largely off the one Dollar General within walking distance. They’ve been told they cannot legally challenge the eviction notice until the land is actually sold, and they’ve received little to no information from the owner since — although they were warned, May said, that anyone withholding rent in the interim would be evicted immediately.

May’s mother, Sharon Williams, works as a home health aid for three disabled men, making $17.50 an hour. It’s enough for her to live on — she’s paid off her car, she can swing groceries, her internet, her phone, her healthcare costs, and the lot rent for her trailer, but it doesn’t leave her with much left over at the end of every month. She can’t afford a more expensive place, nor does she qualify for Section 8 housing, putting her in an impossible situation as the April eviction deadline looms.

Despite their name, mobile homes are not really mobile. Most will fall apart if you try to relocate them, and although residents generally own their trailers, they pay nominal rent to a park owner, who owns the land — in this case, a couple who run a beer store outside Philadelphia. As the cost of living skyrockets, it’s the only stable, affordable housing many are able to find. According to Princeton’s Eviction Lab, the average lot rent nationwide was only $470 a month in 2023; Williams pays just $390, but residents are uniquely vulnerable to displacement. When a trailer park closes, many people are forced to abandon their homes or sell them for next to nothing. If they don’t own their trailer outright, they can find themselves homeless and still paying off a mortgage.

The county’s public housing is roughly 98 percent occupied at the moment, according to a representative from the Lackawanna County Housing Authority. Placements are allocated by a point system, wherein victims of domestic violence, the homeless, and the disabled get first priority, but waitlists for one, two, and three bedrooms are currently closed. Waitlists for studios and four-bedroom apartments remain open, but it can take anywhere between one to five years to get into housing. For now at least, Valley View residents have few good options.

“Everybody’s worried about where they’re going to go,” said Bucksbee.

Tech companies are clearly coming to Archbald for the Susquehanna-Roseland powerline, a $1.4 billion high-voltage transmission line, which would give them access to bulk power. But locals also suspect that the area’s cheap land, lax zoning laws, and centralized capital also appealed to developers. This is old coal territory, and when the mines closed down, a lot of land wound up concentrated in just a few hands.

“Who runs everything with a lot of money? The name DeNaples is on a lot of these buildings,” one Archbald resident told me, after speaking out against the data centers at a utility hearing at the University of Scranton in December. “He’s got his tentacles all over the place.”

DeNaples is Louis DeNaples, an enormously powerful businessman infamous in the Lackawanna Valley, who has long been plagued by accusations of connections to organized crime — specifically to the late mob boss of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Russell Bufalino, who served as counsel to Jimmy Hoffa and may have had him killed, according to some popular accounts. Bufalino was thrust onto the national stage most recently by Martin Scorsese’s 2019 magnum opus, The Irishman, played by a quietly sinister Joe Pesci, but DeNaples himself has no such Hollywood notoriety. He remains a grim specter across the region though — some residents say they are scared of him and attribute a great deal of power to him. “If your little league team needs jerseys, [DeNaples] provides them,” another local explained. “If the local police department needs a new car, he donates.”

DeNaples was one of nine children and grew up poor, selling Christmas trees with his brother Dominick in a vacant lot and reselling junk cars for parts. He reportedly bought his first car for $18 and hauled it himself up the steep hill to his family’s house over the course of two days. Countless cars later, he opened the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, swallowing vast amounts of garbage from New York and Philadelphia, and making DeNaples a millionaire. Eventually, he expanded into real estate, then outwards and upwards from there.

In the late 70s, he pleaded no contest to a conspiracy charge of defrauding the federal government out of over half a million dollars for cleanup work after Hurricane Agnes, but was never convicted. One dissenting juror forced an acquittal, and a Bufalino family underboss was later sent to prison for witness tampering. The charge would come back to haunt him though. In 2006, DeNaples purchased nearby Mount Airy Casino, but was forced to hand control over to his daughter after it was revealed that he’d lied about his relationship to organized crime.

Decades later, he remains a major power broker in the area: one of the largest landowners, the proprietor of many businesses, and the chairman of First National Bank. His name is not just on buildings, but on billboards all across the metro area. DeNaples hasn’t sold any land directly to the data centers, but in 2023 he sold a 186-acre parcel to another local businessman, Jim Marzolino of Kriger Construction, who then sold it to Project Gravity for over $12 million, according to public records. The transaction has raised hackles locally, although there is no evidence DeNaples saw any benefit from the heavy markup of his former land. More recently, DeNaples’ nephew sold land to a proposed data center in nearby Olyphant.

But plenty of other local businessmen, without the alleged mob ties, are more directly involved in the data center boom — Marzolino, for example, or Anthony Domiano Jr., whose family runs a chain of local car dealerships, and who sold a large amount of land to Project South and Project North. Alpesh “Al” Patel, who runs the Al’s Quick Stop convenience store chain in the region, has partnered with Marzolino on development plans for Project Boson.

As for Marzalino, he told The Scranton Times-Tribune his interest in data centers was spurred by a Bitcoin mining hobby.

Neither DeNaples nor Marzolino responded to repeated requests for comment from Grist.

On a freezing night a couple weeks before Christmas, locals gathered at The University of Scranton for a public hearing on their electricity bills. PPL Electric Utilities had announced a rate hike for the fourth time in two years — this one, raising consumer electricity prices by 7 percent.

“I make about triple the Pennsylvania minimum wage — and I still freeze in my house,” said Jordan Moran, a student in cybersecurity at Lackawanna College, who also works a full-time job. “My thermostat is at 60 degrees, and my PPL bill is still nearly 20 percent of my monthly income.”

PPL serves about 1.5 million ratepayers in Pennsylvania, and its territory has been overrun by data center proposals in recent years, significantly raising electricity prices in certain areas of the country. But under the utility’s proposed plan, data centers would receive a rate cut, which rankled attendees. Although the region needs jobs, “there’s no potential job growth really, for the local people. I’m one of the few people who would actually be qualified to even apply for a job there once they put [the data centers] up,” Moran told me after the hearing. “We don’t have a lot of computer science majors out there.”

Three questions to prepare for data center development in your community

Does your community have a data center ordinance in place?
An ordinance passed by your local elected representatives (your city council, for example) can restrict data centers to industrial areas, without overhauling the entire zoning code. However, an ordinance may not be able to restrict a data center developer that has already submitted an application to begin construction.

Who is developing the data center, and on what timeline?
If developers have applied to build data centers in your community, you can submit a right-to-know request to your local open records office. You can ask for site plans, conditional use applications, noise studies, and “will serve” letters from your local water and electric utility. The application should have contact information for the developers and/or their lawyers.

How is it being cooled and powered?
Although data centers all have different ways of cooling and powering their campuses, local ordinances can steer a project in a community’s desired direction. The Sierra Club of Virginia, for example, recommends performing a water impact study, requiring any buildings to adhere to the highest heating and cooling standards, and — if possible — prohibiting cooling water discharge into the municipal water supply to minimize pollution.

As several people at the utility hearing pointed out, Trump was scheduled to speak the following night in the conference room at the DeNaples’ family casino, to begin what the president claimed would be a series of rallies across the country. Concerns of affordability — lost jobs, hiring freezes, inflation, skyrocketing bills, the kind of concerns that had brought people out to that utility meeting the night before — the president called, “a myth.” Something incredible was just over the horizon, he promised, growing closer by the day. “You’re going to see what happens over the next two years. It’s like a miracle is taking place,” he said, as he opened the rally. “All of the companies that are pouring their money into building right now — building plants in Pennsylvania and many other states — auto plants, AI plants, plants of every type.”

At this point, it appears all six data centers coming to the borough will pull from the grid. According to Archbald’s updated zoning agreement, oil, gas, and nuclear plants will not be allowed to co-locate alongside data centers. But the facilities are likely to fuel a fracking surge across Western Pennsylvania, and new buildings will bring hundreds of diesel backup generators to town. Should unsustainable power demands regularly force data centers off the grid, those generators could be running with relative frequency — emitting pollutants that have been linked to heart disease and cancer and generating noise that can disturb neighborhoods.

To make matters more complicated, Archbald’s water system is privately owned and operated by American Water, the nation’s largest private water company. Residents are concerned the town’s data center boom will also affect these bills and threaten their drinking supply. Project Gravity alone is expected to pump 360,000 gallons of water a day from Lake Scranton, which serves 134,570 people across Lackawanna County. Developers of the Wildcat Ridge Data Center are proposing to pump up to 3.3 million gallons per day — some of it potentially from the minor sea of ground and rainwater that now fills the empty coal mines beneath the building site. The developer’s plans include a subsidence contingency, but looking over the scale of the place, it’s not hard to see where the residents are coming from when they talk of colossal buildings collapsing and the ready-made grave the mining industry left beneath the town.

All of this assumes these facilities actually get built. Experts have speculated that half of data center proposals could be duplicative, meaning developers are applying in multiple places across the country but will ultimately only build a single campus. It’s also unclear who the tenants will be at this point, and according to Markey, developers have been tight-lipped. “They’ll say cryptic things like, ‘You know of this company. You probably use them every day,” he told me. “They all say the same thing — that they’re next in line for power.”

Battery storage could replace some of those backup generators, closed-loop cooling (in which water is endlessly recycled) could reduce water usage, and harmful chemicals could be swapped out, but there’s really no way to know for sure until the tech company that will be leasing the space is known, making approving these projects a significant gamble.

There are few guardrails for the industry at the moment. In February, the Trump administration rolled out the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, an initiative that asks tech companies to voluntarily agree to pay the cost of upgrading transmission lines and building power plants — rather than having those costs passed along to the average consumer. It was almost immediately derided as “smoke and mirrors” and “a toothless, empty promise” by Democratic congressman Frank Pallone, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Governor Shapiro, who has championed AI’s rush into Pennsylvania, recently proposed an initiative that would incentivize responsible data center development. Projects that agreed to bring their own transmission, offer transparent community engagement, and clear community benefits agreements would qualify for the state’s Permit Fast Track Program, which can significantly speed up the building process.

Critics pointed out that this would still incentivize developers to build gas plants, rather than switch to renewable energy, and that it’s difficult to enforce. “The developer gets all the benefits on the front end and bears none of the risk,” Emma Bast, a lawyer at PennFuture, told Spotlight PA. “And if the developer doesn’t follow through on the voluntary things, there are not a lot of options for the state.”

Some residents are reluctantly making plans to move. “These data centers have to go somewhere,” said Jim Schaback, who told me he would likely rent out his house in Archbald if the developments go through. “I hate that they’re going here.” Matthew Bucksbee and Candace May recently got word that they may be able to move to a plot of land owned by a friend in Forest City, about 20 minutes north. “We’ll be moving into another trailer for the time being, but once that’s paid off, we could build up there,” said May. She was excited about the prospect of having a bunch of land for their sons to roam around. Tiffany, whose property in Jermyn borders Project Gravity, said that she would consider moving if data center developers began building in Jermyn or neighboring Mayfield to avoid being sandwiched between the buildings.

“Where would you go though?” she said. “Because everywhere just sucks.”

Before Farris spoke at the Project South hearing in January, community members gathered outside the auditorium, some distributing pamphlets, others gossiping. Among the crowd were Jack and Amy Swingle, who told me they moved to the area to be close to their children. They recently signed on to a lawsuit appealing the updated data center zoning, arguing it does not adequately protect residents. But neither of them had high hopes for the night. At the previous hearing, they explained, developers had tried to soften the blow by promising that the data centers would bring more retail to the area — a Trader Joe’s, for example, which could potentially accompany the construction of the Wildcat Ridge AI center. “That’s one of the things I have [to say] in here,” said another woman standing nearby, gesturing to her notes. “Don’t be so condescending.”

But the revenue that the building boom promises the region is real enough. The data centers would bring roughly $20 million in property taxes for Archbald, Farris said to the audience gathered, $50 million for Lackawanna County, and $100 million for the Valley View School District every year. Many municipalities were throwing tax breaks at developers, hoping to attract their attention. Archbald is not. Its abundant fiber-optic cables, high voltage electrical lines, nearby gas pipelines, and its proximity to Secaucus, New Jersey (a “pairing point” for data centers, where they exchange information) make it attractive regardless. Farris had sought this place out himself, but other nearby towns looked nearly as appealing as Archbald, he explained. Should the opposition continue to grow, developers might take their projects elsewhere — maybe to Berwick, about an hour away.

“They’re going to get all the benefit, and you guys aren’t going to get anything,” Farris told the crowd. “[Data centers] are a necessity in life, and the decision has come down to, ‘Do you want to benefit from that necessity?”

Archbald resident, Tamara Healy, asked about Community Benefit Agreements — she’d googled them, and it seemed to her that something like that should be in place before things proceeded any further. “Now, it’s ironic that you’re Googling stuff and you’re against data centers,” said Farris. “Just for the record.”

Still, the town needs tax revenue, and it’s true that no other industry of this size and scale seems interested in the area. “We have just enough money in our checking account to pay payroll and keep the lights on, but every month we have a debate about canceling or suspending music or art,” said a solicitor, speaking on behalf of Valley View School District administrators in November 2025.

Documents first published last week by DeSmog show that developers played a significant role in determining the terms of the data center overlay ordinance that ultimately passed in November 2025. Council President Dave Moran requested a 1000-yard buffer zone between data centers and adjacent properties. That was whittled down to just 300 yards in the final language.

The area of the updated data center district that was ultimately passed was determined by the existing industrial zones in the town, and “the rest of the lines drawn were property lines of property owners looking to develop or sell to developers,” according to an email from Markey. “They were pretty much all specific requests.”

Armed with proof that town officials and wealthy landowners were seemingly working against them, the Stop Archbald Data Centers Facebook group erupted, organizing a petition to immediately relieve Dan Markey, zoning officer Brian Dulay, council president Dave Moran, and Archbald borough solicitor Jay O’Connor of their duties. But, as PennFuture attorney Brigitte Meyer explained, negotiating with the developer is fairly standard in cases such as these, especially given the fact that data centers were technically permitted in certain commercial zones. Had the borough tried to exclude the data centers on the basis of something like height restrictions, developers could have taken them to court over what’s called “de facto exclusionary zoning” — arguing that the restrictions betrayed an antiquated understanding of data centers and were unduly constrictive

“That is a valid type of legal challenge,” explained Meyer. It wouldn’t be a guaranteed win for developers, but nor would Archbald be assured of victory. The only certainty is that it would be a costly legal fight. “The borough may have looked at it and thought, ‘Well, our chances of winning a challenge like this aren’t so good.’” Other areas that rejected data center proposals, such as nearby Ransom township, have faced lawsuits. Clifton township, which rushed to get a data center overlay in place when they got wind of developer interest last year, is still locked in a lawsuit, filed by the developer mere hours before the ordinance was adopted.

Whether borough officials made things too easy for developers or felt their hands were tied isn’t totally clear. As of this writing, most of them have refused to speak to me, even though the most damning evidence against them to date is their secrecy. But council member Erin Owen, who has opposed the data centers since the outset, did return my calls last week. She had not been happy with the data center overlay and said she was shut out of private meetings — like the one I stumbled on back in December — to lay out the terms of the ordinance. “They made a big mistake in doing that, because it does not seem transparent at all,” she said. “They only picked the council members that they wanted to know.”

Council has had little luck helping Valley View Estates residents find alternative housing as of this writing, she told me, and although gas and nuclear plants are not allowed to co-locate alongside data centers, there is industrial land available in town where she believes developers will build their own gas plants.

“All the impacts will be terrible,” she said. Owen is a fourth-generation resident of Archbald and has served on the borough council for the past ten years. “A lot of trees will be lost. A lot of wildlife will be lost. Homes are going to be last. Pollutants in the air, pollutants in the soil, and then the water, the noise — it’s just going to be very disturbing.”

The only hope at this point seems to be drastic action on the state level. Legislators on both sides of the aisle have taken notice of the problems facing Pennsylvania as the tech industry moves in. Republican State Representative Jamie Walsh announced he would soon be introducing a suite of bills to better regulate development. Democratic State Senator Katie Muth released a memo announcing that she plans to propose a three-year moratorium on data center development, calling it a “necessary step to protect public health, safety, fiscal stability, and environmental integrity.”

Even so, it may not be enough to help Archbald, given how eager data centers are to set up shop in the area. It was nearly impossible to find anyone in town who was pro-data center development, although I asked around widely. Some said they weren’t against it, but wouldn’t explain further. Older residents tended to be the least troubled about the data centers, but in a fairly fatalistic way. “I’m going to die tomorrow,” one woman told me at Barrett’s Pub on Main Street. Barrett’s used to be owned by the mayor, and I’d stopped to grab some dinner. The woman told me she used to do nails; now she works for Lockheed Martin. “I don’t know what the data centers want. I don’t know what they do to you. I don’t know what they do to your children,” she said. “Younger people — do they know what’s happening?”

I wasn’t sure what to tell her, other than that the town was once again being targeted because of an accident of geography and moneyed interests. The longer I spent reporting on this, the more I felt no one had the full picture, not the developers, not the bankers facilitating the baffling circular investments financing the boom, not the chip manufacturers or software engineers, certainly not the tech CEOs. A few weeks earlier, while visiting San Francisco, I’d watched a dog riding in a driverless taxi — paws hanging out the window, tongue waving in the wind, seemingly ferried around by a ghost. This is where those ghosts would come from.

Editor’s Note: Pennsylvania has cities, boroughs, townships, and a single town. Because this article is intended for a national audience, we sometimes refer to Archbald colloquially as a “town.”

Correction: An earlier of version of this article misstated the status of the Clifton Township legal dispute.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/the-ai-boom-has-plunged-a-small-pennsylvania-town-into-chaos/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org