“I Believe in one God, and It’s Not a Computer”

This story was originally published by Grist and Spotlight PA is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“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.

At first, Archbald’s zoning code classified data centers as roughly on par with commercial office buildings.

By now, the culm piles are covered in vegetation and appear almost natural, but you can tell something........

© Mother Jones

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