‘People are going to get screwed’: Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

Dynamite blasts have shaken Ken and Dolly Potteiger’s central Pennsylvania home for the past two months, as construction crews flatten the hillside the family has lived beside for decades.

The hills are being blown up to make way for PAX-1, a data-centre project spanning roughly 700 acres that is separated from the Potteigers’ farm by a chain-link fence.

“We couldn’t even see our yard or the field, there was so much dirt in the air,” Dolly Potteiger said of the blasts that demolished the landscape she had looked out at for more than 53 years.

The Potteigers’ unease echoes across Middlesex Township, where so many opponents to the construction of PAX-1 flooded a recent town hall meeting that it was cancelled for exceeding the venue’s 150-person capacity.

The backlash against the rapid expansion of data centres has become a flashpoint in Pennsylvania — a key swing state — and across the US ahead of November’s midterm elections, scrambling partisan divisions in battleground races as Democrats and Republicans jockey to position themselves as tough on the industry.

The intensifying public concern over potential job losses, increased prices for electricity and water, and environmental degradation comes despite investment in AI and data centres accounting for about a third of US economic growth this year.

The backlash has also put some Republican candidates at odds with President Donald Trump, who this week said Americans opposing AI data centres wanted to end up “backwards and poor”.

In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley — home to Bethlehem, where the FT is undertaking a multiyear reporting project — lawns are peppered with signs opposing proposals for six data centres in the roughly 700-square-mile region.

In the seventh congressional district — a toss-up seat covering much of the Lehigh Valley — plans for Project Atlas on a 410-acre site 20 minutes east of Bethlehem have pushed the issue to the forefront of election campaigning.

The district’s candidates, Democratic challenger Bob Brooks and Republican Ryan Mackenzie, both support an executive order signed in August by Democratic governor Josh Shapiro that will slow data centre approvals, increase transparency around proposed agreements, require campuses to source their own power and strengthen local authorities’ power to oppose projects.

The candidates’ positions align with the nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvanians who think data centres are a problem, according to a Muhlenberg College poll.

Residents see the developments as an intrusion from “outside interests” and a “privileged class” in ways that cut across partisan lines, said Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Lehigh University.

Shapiro’s executive order marked a U-turn for the governor, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who had praised a commitment by Amazon to invest $20bn in data centres across the state.

“I see him a little vexed by this issue, and I haven’t seen him vexed before,” Borick said. “[Politicians are] trying to take advantage of [the backlash against data centres] but they’re also frightened to hell” that they may already be behind public opinion.

Roger Wehner, vice-president of economic development at Amazon Web Services, said the company’s investment would generate tax revenue and opportunities for local contractors, as well as permanent jobs, “the vast majority of which don’t require a four-year degree”.

For builders even temporary jobs created by the data centre boom are welcome. “Every construction job is temporary,” said Paul Anthony, president of the Lehigh Valley Building Trades.

“It’s not like the old Bethlehem Steel where you get hired out of high school and then work for your whole career,” he said of the once-mighty steel mill which employed tens of thousands of workers in its heyday.

“The more construction going on, the more opportunities we can provide people to make it to that middle class.”

Some residents are also broadly supportive of the new centres. Ralph Witkowski, who for 60 years has lived just south of the nearby city of Allentown, close to the Atlas project site, said that while he was concerned about higher power and water bills, he views the potential of AI as worth the risk.

“At the end of the day, you need data centres . . . some people are going to get a little bit screwed. But in the long run, I think a lot of us are going to have better lives,” he said.

In Pennsylvania, 29 data centre projects have been proposed in the past year according to the market intelligence firm DC Byte. State lawmakers have responded with dozens of bills, including proposed moratoriums and rollbacks of tax incentives worth an estimated $1.7bn over five years.

State senator Jarrett Coleman, a Republican from the Lehigh Valley, said he was surprised at how quickly data centres had become a top issue. “I didn’t think they would be, but they are,” Coleman said. “Something changed.”

The response of lawmakers has been swift. More than a third of the municipalities advised by the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission have adopted data centre ordinances setting rules on zoning, noise and buffers around existing properties.

“I have never seen an elected official response like I’ve seen for data centres,” said Becky Bradley, the executive director of the commission.

Even where tougher regulations are already in place, local officials are under pressure from residents over proposed developments.

In South Whitehall Township, special planning commission meetings have been scheduled to review Project Atlas, which will sit across the street from Pennsylvania’s fifth-largest high school, prompting worries over increased traffic as well as noise and heat.

Greg Sussman, who lives opposite the site, was surprised to learn about the project at a January township meeting. Many of his neighbours were in the dark as well.

“There was just this massive deficiency in people’s visibility,” Sussman said.

Sussman has helped assemble a team of volunteers to fight the developers, who are set to invest $8.9bn in the project. Engineers and lawyers in the group are scouring the 2,900-page proposal for anything that might fall foul of local ordinances.

The fight against the project has become a rare point of unity in a moment of intense political polarisation in the community, according to Sussman.

“We’ve spoken to people who are hard left, hard right, and everywhere across the spectrum . . . It’s provided a rallying point for people to realise that we aren’t all that different,” he said.

Back in Middlesex Township, the remaining farmland around the Potteigers’ home glowed in the evening light as a breeze kicked up dust clouds among the vast expanse of diggers and dump trucks that stretched towards the horizon on the PAX-1 project site.

“I understand this is the future and this needs to come,” Dolly Potteiger said. “But I spend a lot of nights crying.”