In one Pennsylvania borough, AI's physical footprint would be hard to miss. The Washington Post's Tim Craig reports that developers want to blanket roughly 14% of Archbald, a town of 7,000 near the Poconos, with six data-center campuses holding 51 massive warehouses—some bigger than a million square feet. It would be a jarring change for a former coal town that "is so small that some of its most recognizable buildings are funeral homes," writes Craig. One teacher woke up to chainsaws leveling 180 acres of woods behind his home; another resident learned one project's 574 diesel generators would sit about 900 feet from his house.
As for why Archbald, reps for the developers cite its location near the 500-kilovolt Susquehanna-Roseland power line and its ample land and freshwater. The groundwork for the data-center influx began in 2023, when the town's government OK'd updated zoning parameters that had language allowing for data centers. There was little community pushback at the time; that's no longer the case.
The current reality: Lawn signs declaring "NO DATA CENTERS," packed council and planning board meetings, a 10,000-member Facebook group opposed to the data centers, and calls to oust officials who backed the deals. The political fallout is already real—most of the borough council has resigned in the last month. For the full picture of how one small town became a test case in America's data-center wars, read the piece here.
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