BUCKS COUNTY, Pennsylvania — Just a few months ago, data centers were the belle of the Pennsylvania ball. Now they’re public enemy No. 1.
A bartender in Harrisburg back in the spring told me she thought the local economy was on the rise, and she pointed to a plan to reopen the long-dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power a fleet of data centers for Microsoft.
Out in western Pennsylvania, when rumors of a data center began spreading in the most depressed corner of the state, local politicians and businessmen were thrilled.
By this fall, data centers had become a boogeyman.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), who was an artificial intelligence and data center cheerleader at the beginning of 2026, last month made a big deal about slapping new regulations on them. His Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, has been attacking him for his love affair with the industry, and Shapiro, in turn, is using AI industry donations to Garrity against her.
And here in the Philadelphia area, where control over both the state Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance, every candidate who can is attacking the other as a stooge of data centers.
Republican Frank Farry represents part of lower Bucks County in the state Senate. In nearby Falls Township, Amazon is planning a massive data center at the site of a former U.S. Steel plant. His Democratic opponent, Eileen Albillar, is running ads attacking him for coziness with data centers.
Her ad mentions that Farry voted for big tax breaks for data centers while his law firm represented the Bucks County data center developers.
In neighboring Berks and Montgomery counties, the 24th Senate District is another key battleground, and both major candidates are attacking each other as stooges of data centers.
According to Republican state Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, her challenger, Chris Thomas, “answers to radical California donors and data center developers.” Pennycuick’s attack ad on Thomas closes with a shot of him with a picture of data center server racks pasted behind him and the words “Chris Thomas is for them, not us.”
Thomas’s attacks on Pennycuick sound the same theme: She took money from data center developers.
PENNSYLVANIA’S VICE ECONOMY
The politicians know which way the wind is blowing. A Philadelphia Inquirer poll in August found that 60% of likely voters opposed the construction of data centers. A separate Franklin & Marshall poll found that 79% “opposed the construction of a data center in their community.”
Just a few months ago, there was reason to believe Pennsylvania would be ground zero for the data center boom. Now “data center” has become a curse word.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
