Take a Breath, Pennsylvania
As the furor grows around AI, cryptocurrency and their rapidly proliferating data centers, Pennsylvania is looking like the kid on the playground, waving his hand frantically out of a desperate desire to get a spot on the team.
A high degree of uncertainty exists regarding AI’s energy demands. Remember when a single computer filled an entire room at IBM? Now we wear computers on our wrists. The recent announcement that China has produced a model (called DeepSeek) that outperforms Open AI, which is smaller and more efficient with lower energy requirements, calls into question many of our current assumptions. Perhaps we shouldn’t be in such a rush to build these sprawling data center warehouses, each an average size of 100,000 square feet and costing approximately $1 billion to build, that run 24 hours per day, require massive amounts of electricity and water and subject our communities to noise, light and emissions pollution. Constructing too fast will mean overbuilding inefficient infrastructure which will, in turn, risk becoming stranded assets whose costs will shift — in what some call a “massive taxpayer liability” — to us.
Second, the public is being left out of the decision making. Closed-door meetings, like the one convened recently by Governor Shapiro, are held with no public input. Deals are made in secret, and local officials are being asked to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements which keep them from discussing relevant information until decisions are finalized. Inflated promises being fed to the public help obscure more problematic realities, all of which is to the industry’s benefit.
Nevertheless, resistance is growing. People living near data centers say they’re like “maximum security prisons.” People living near crypto operations say the noise is so great it feels like torture.
Let’s take a breath, Pennsylvania. Sometimes winning means staying off the team.
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