AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
One community near Scranton, Pennsylvania, is resisting developers' plans to build six data center campuses in their small town. Kat Bolus from member station WVIA reports that because of that opposition, residents who were once strangers are now allied to fight the industry from changing their neighborhoods.
KAT BOLUS, BYLINE: Archbald, Pennsylvania is wedged between mountains cut by the Lackawanna River, and it's facing the most data center campus proposals of any municipality in Pennsylvania.
MADONNA MUNLEY: Right here will be Archbald I. The power plant will be right past that pole.
BOLUS: Residents Tammy Misewicz-Healey and Madonna Munley are at a local park.
TAMMY MISEWICZ-HEALEY: Basically, what they want to do is line all mountain ranges with data centers. And then if they could find land within the valley, they'll even put it there.
BOLUS: The women have a 30-year age gap. A year ago, Munley says if she passed Misewicz-Healey in the grocery store, they would've been strangers.
MUNLEY: I wouldn't have known her. I would've said, hello.
MISEWICZ-HEALEY: I know. Yep.
MUNLEY: But I wouldn't have known her.
BOLUS: They and many of their neighbors now share a common goal that transcends generations and political divides, stopping the data center industry from changing their lives. Archbald is slightly smaller than Manhattan and could be home to 50 data centers the size of Walmarts. Munley is a retired teacher and the fifth generation of her family to live in the borough.
MUNLEY: The whole point is we're focused on the safety, the welfare and the health of edthe town.
BOLUS: Misewicz-Healey and her husband have three children under 6. They run the Stop Archbald Data Centers group. The group has brought together hundreds of residents in northeast PA, whose yellow no-data-center T-shirts are fading from the many public meetings and hearings they attend. It's also become a resource for the resistance in Pennsylvania and beyond.
MISEWICZ-HEALEY: You know, people say, if you guys didn't speak up, like, this would've just been pushed through in all of our towns.
BOLUS: JoyAnna Hopper says data centers are causing more people to pay attention to local politics. She's an associate professor of political science at the University of Scranton. Hopper compares the increased civic engagement to fracking for natural gas with one big difference, the drilling became a Republican versus Democrat issue.
JOYANNA HOPPER: In this case, it's, you know, Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who would not think of themselves as being political at all, all sitting in the same room wanting the same thing.
BOLUS: That's been Colby Wesner's experience. He's a member of the Concerned Citizens of Montour County.
COLBY WESNER: It doesn't matter right now. We are lock in step on working together on this issue, and it's a pretty beautiful phenomenon, I'd say.
BOLUS: Wesner's group successfully fought zoning for a data center 83 miles from Archbald. Dan Diorio says data center opponents around the country should have fact-based, data-driven conversations about the industry. He's the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition. The membership association includes familiar names like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Diorio says the opponents should ask if the developers will pay to upgrade the local electrical infrastructure. He says they should also ask how the centers will use water and what the economic benefit is for the community. People say that data centers cause utility prices to skyrocket, but Diorio says that's not always the case.
DAN DIORIO: It's the need for investment in infrastructure, like poles and wires and transformers.
BOLUS: He points out that data centers will power much more than AI.
DIORIO: The vast majority of data centers being built and put into operation today are for cloud infrastructure. And that's the underpinning of virtually the entire 21st century economy.
BOLUS: But the residents want to know, at what cost?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Why our town?
BOLUS: That's a crowd of around 400 responding to a developer's promise of giving $17 million to Archbald if it hosts the data center campus. Karen Timmons spoke after the announcement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KAREN TIMMONS: The consequence of hosting a data center are too high, costing us our health and changing our environment forever, not even with your community benefit offers.
(APPLAUSE)
BOLUS: Hopper, the political science professor, says data centers have become a unifying issue. Life, she says, is expensive. People feel exploited and have found common ground. She says, that's democracy.
For NPR News, I'm Kat Bolus in Archbald. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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