Concerns about water and power demands surface as data centers boom in Delaware River watershed

Most Pennsylvanians probably couldn’t point out Tobyhanna Township on a map. But parents of young children likely know Kalahari resorts, a popular indoor waterpark that draws visitors to this rural slice of the Poconos year-round.

In the years ahead, there might be a new neighbor sucking up even more water: a massive AI data center.

What’s happening in this Monroe County community is indicative of a wider trend underway in Pennsylvania around data centers, particularly those newly proposed to feed a global artificial intelligence boom.

Data centers, especially those hosting AI servers can use as much energy as a small city and as much water as a small town, potentially leading to scarcity and driving up consumer utility prices. Yet, they’re also multi-billion-dollar investments that can boost local tax bases and create jobs, creating a rush to build in Pennsylvania and a subsequent rise in opposition in some would-be host communities.  

For years, lawmakers in Pennsylvania have set the table for the industry’s arrival in the commonwealth. The industry’s coming-out party was held at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh in July, when politicians from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, to President Donald Trump, a Republican, joined industry leaders in promising massive investments in the state. That included a commitment from internet commerce behemoth Amazon to spend at least $20 billion on data center construction in Pennsylvania, including two initial projects in Bucks and Luzerne Counties, both in the Delaware River watershed.

“Pennsylvania is competing again — and I’m proud to announce that with Amazon’s commitment of at least $20 billion to build new state-of-the-art data center campuses across our Commonwealth, we have secured the largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said.

Closer to the ground, some aren’t as jazzed. Brigitte Meyer is a Tobyhanna resident running for township supervisor, who is also a staff attorney for the environmental nonprofit PennFuture. Speaking in her role as a candidate, Meyer said she’s been digging into the details of a proposal that surfaced earlier this year to rezone a 193-acre parcel south of Kalahari resort for construction of a data center. 

Township records reflect that developer Pocono Manor Investors is seeking an ordinance to allow for a pair of data centers that would add up to a “hyperscale” facility. That’s industry parlance for the largest class of data center, typically measuring at least a quarter acre and using 40 megawatts of energy — enough to power tens of thousands of homes. But some can be much larger: A single Amazon hyperscale data center near Berwick spans more than seven acres and the company is seeking 480 MW of energy in expansion plans. Large data centers can also use up to 5 million gallons of water a day — more than a quarter of Scranton’s daily demand.

Meyer’s concerns are numerous. There’s the resource demand — data centers use massive amounts of water and energy to operate. Row upon row of servers and other computer hardware require copious electricity to power, while water is pushed through sealed pipes to cool them. The large, boxy exteriors of data centers are also akin to fulfillment warehouses, which have proved controversial as they popped up across the Northeast Pennsylvania landscape over the past decade. 

“We’ve been dealing with the warehouse boom here in the Poconos over the last, you know, five years or so. So, people are attuned to land use,” Meyer said. “It controls what the community you live in looks like, how it operates, how it affects you. It’s one of the greatest powers that local governments have.”

That leads to Meyer’s overarching concern: that the proposed ordinance, if passed by the Tobyhanna Board of Supervisors, would allow data centers to come to the township by right, as opposed to requiring a developer to come before the township each time to talk specifics, receive public feedback, and ultimately negotiate a final outcome.

“We have to accept that some degree of this development will occur here,” Meyer said. “We can’t zone out progress everywhere. But what we can do is control it.”

These kinds of conversations are rising in communities about as fast as potential projects are announced, to some extent even by those largely supportive of AI development.

Luzerne County proposal hits rough patch

Harry Haas is a Kingston resident and County Council member for Luzerne County, where Amazon is already constructing its massive data center campus next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant, from which it will directly draw power. Haas, a self-described pro-business Republican, said he considers it “fortunate” that Amazon selected Luzerne County for its investments. And county and local officials have worked to make that happen by lining up large tax breaks for the project, calculating that it will eventually contribute at least $7 million annually to local coffers.

But the good vibes are being tested by a proposal for what Haas said is a “secondary” Amazon data center facility about 20 miles away near Hazleton. In March, the County Council approved a 10-year tax break to facilitate that project, which is being orchestrated by the Kansas City-based developer NorthPoint Development. Later, Haas said, commissioners learned of plans by the electric utility PPL to build a new high-voltage transmission line through the nearby Sugarloaf Valley to reach it. That raised eyebrows in a region where people of all political stripes bristle at overdevelopment.

“I keep telling people here, ‘I think it’s starting to catch us, and we don’t want to be the Lehigh Valley,’” Haas said. “I generally believe in free enterprise. But I also want to make sure we maintain quality of life.”

In March, Haas was the only council member to vote against tax breaks for the property, according to The Citizens’ Voice. In light of the transmission project, other members have begun to question the way the county is doing business around data centers, and Haas continues to agitate for new policies, including a potential moratorium on tax breaks.

Farther down the watershed, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network has staked out opposition to Amazon’s pursuit of an AI data center along the river in Bucks County, just north of the nonprofit’s headquarters. Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum expressed concerns over water and electric use, local control and transparency, and potential air and water pollution.

“We’re very concerned about the volume of water, where this water is coming from,” van Rossum said. “Data centers are scooping up extra water… and that means it’s not available for other uses, right?” 

But little appears to stand in the way of development in Bucks County. In early August, Shapiro visited the Keystone Trade Center in Falls Township, a massive former US Steel site proposed for redevelopment by Amazon for data and fulfillment centers, touting what he said would be thousands of tech and construction jobs.

In emails obtained by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network through an open record request, a Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection air program staffer in February referred to the Bucks County proposal as a “governor’s priority project” and told colleagues that means they would “need to ensure that we meet/exceed all timelines.”

Will Simons, a Shapiro spokesman, told Delaware Currents that the governor “is laser-focused on getting stuff done,” having launched an Office of Transformation and Opportunity tasked with “tackling permitting reform, cutting through red tape, and making Pennsylvania government more efficient.” The administration says that as of March, the DEP had cut its permit backlog by 87 percent, which it said eliminated delays for critical projects “while maintaining environmental safeguards.”

Representatives for Amazon declined an on-the-record interview request but provided information via email. The company said that it “collaborates with local water utilities to manage water use responsibly,” and it is more than halfway toward a 2030 “water positive goal” of returning more water to communities than it utilizes.

“Amazon is continually improving water efficiency, using advanced cloud services, such as internet of things technologies, to analyze real time water use, identify and fix leaks, and gain other efficiencies,” the company said, adding that it is also “improving operational efficiency to reduce cooling water use in many facilities for most of the year, instead by relying on outside air.”

Uncharted waters

For many keeping an eye on Pennsylvania’s budding data center boom, uncertainty is the operative word. Answers to key questions are tough to pin down.

How many AI data centers will land here? How much water and electricity will they use, and where will those resources come from? How much of the cost will be borne by taxpayers? What happens in the event of an emergency? And perhaps the most unanswerable: Will they be a net positive, or net negative?

In a June report, the consulting firm Wood MacKenzie tracked data center projects announced since 2023 and found Pennsylvania in line for the third most of any state after Texas and Virginia. Analysts said Pennsylvania is generally perceived as an advantageous location given its geographic proximity to population centers, relatively cheap land, and abundant natural and technological resources.

However, John Quigley, a former PADEP secretary and now senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said announced projects are often double or triple counted and not all will come to fruition.

“Announcements of these data centers sometimes overlap… the same data center is announced in multiple regions. So, there’s a lot of overcounting [and] overestimation of demand,” Quigley said.

The dynamic causes headaches at all levels of policymaking. PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization tasked with maintaining the electric grid in 13 states stretching from North Carolina to Lake Michigan, calculates that AI data center growth is the primary driver of swiftly rising energy demand. The organization also holds regular auctions based on perceived future demand, driving up the cost of energy in the short-term even if not everything pans out.

“One of the results is that we’ve seen skyrocketing energy prices to a significant degree because of the specter of these data centers,” Quigley said.

That dynamic was on display during a hearing called by David Argall, chairman of the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee, on data centers in early August. Composed of primarily pro-development panelists, the event offered no opportunity for public comment from a sizable crowd inside the auditorium at Valley View High School in Archbald, Pa.

But Argall, a Republican from the 29^th Senate District, himself said he was there to weigh the pros and cons and primarily to try to ascertain which data centers will be built, noting that nine had been proposed in his district across Carbon, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties, which are largely within the Delaware River watershed. He noted that not all of them would get built.

Discrepancies over water use also surfaced at the hearing. John Augustine III, president of Penn’s Northeast, a regional economic development agency that helped facilitate Amazon’s projects in Luzerne County, downplayed concerns over water, claiming newer closed-loop technologies use as little as “one to two swimming pools” of water to operate, compared to traditional methods that use millions of gallons a day for large data centers.

“That would scare the hell out of me if I was a resident and I was on well water,” Augustine said. “But that’s just not financially stable for a business to continue to do that, and it’s also not good environmental practices.”

But representatives of the Delaware River Basin Commission and its Susquehanna River counterpart seemed more concerned, noting that common current cooling methods withdraw millions of gallons of water a day and evaporate much of it, potentially stressing water resources. The problem can be compounded by power plants also ramping up to meet energy demand from the centers, as they also require large quantities of water for cooling, said Andrew Dehoff, executive director of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.

“I can tell you I have colleagues in Atlanta, Texas, and [Virginia] that are in full on panic mode about how they’re going to meet the water supply demand,” Dehoff said.

In an email to Delaware Currents, DRBC spokesperson Elizabeth Koniers Brown said the agency currently has no applications for water withdrawals related to data centers, but is “currently undertaking an inventory of existing data centers to better understand which public water supply systems serve them and how their wastewater is managed.”

Van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, said water use is a transparency issue, as it appears many data centers use or plan to use existing water capacity from nearby water utilities. That’s shaping up to be the case at Amazon’s planned data center in Bucks County, where the Morrisville Municipal Authority oversees water and wastewater facilities at the industrial complex there. Executive Director John Warenda Jr. said the utility several years ago took over existing permits dating to US Steel operations, which allow for massive quantities of surface water to be pulled from the river.

That permit will be the one used to supply Amazon with service water, along with several other commercial operations in the industrial park. Morrisville’s residential customers are served by a separate system, he said.

“We think in the next 10 or 15 years the likely maximum daily demand (from all users) might average somewhere in the 15- to 20-million gallons a day range,” Warenda said, with peak daily flows of a few more million gallons. “We know we have sufficient capacity.”

Similarly, in Northeast Pennsylvania, the developer of the potential Tobyhanna data center has told township officials the property has a pair of existing water wells, including one rated to draw 400 gallons per minute. Meyer, the attorney running for township supervisor, isn’t quite sure what to make of that. She said many of the township’s residents rely on the aquifer for well water, but it’s hard to know what, if any, negative impact there might be. That’s why she’s pushing for the township zoning policy to have something other than a by-right approval for a data center use.

“Once you have those rules in place, you can’t change them in the middle of the game,” Meyer said. “We want to have something in place where we can put the brakes on things if we have to.”

Van Rossum worries about cumulative impacts across the watershed. She acknowledges that technically water utilities are already permitted to use the resources and can thus on paper provide extra capacity to data centers. But she wonders about the practical effects of perhaps dozens of new data centers each drawing millions of gallons a day that otherwise wouldn’t be utilized, especially during drought conditions or other acute events.

“There will be conflicts,” van Rossum said. “And it is my best guess that if there is a conflict it’s going to be the industry that wins the day, and it is the people of Pennsylvania that are going to have to give up their water lifeline in order to feed these AI industries.”