Data centers are following the fracking playbook. A new bill wants to give communities more power.

Five data centers were proposed within a few miles of each other in King of Prussia this summer, and a separate 2-million-square-foot data center was proposed in neighboring Conshohocken. The local political response has begun to look familiar to anyone who watched Pennsylvania hash out its fracking rules a decade ago.

That is the backdrop for a federal bill Rep. Ro Khanna introduced last week, the "Data Center Bill of Rights," which would bar new data centers within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, childcare facilities, hospitals, and nursing homes, and would call for a pause on data center development in Pennsylvania until local controls and broader protections are in place (Inquirer, Khanna press release).

Khanna, a California Democrat who grew up in Bucks County, said the bill was "partly inspired" by what he heard on a 15-county Pennsylvania tour, where data center concerns topped every other issue at every stop. "I was surprised by the anger about it in Pennsylvania," he said. "In other states, people are sometimes opposed in local communities, local pockets. But not this widespread anger" (Inquirer).

In the Philadelphia suburbs it tracks clustering: five projects in close proximity in King of Prussia, the Conshohocken proposal, transmission-line routing that hasn't gotten a public airing. In Western Pennsylvania it tracks energy-community grievances familiar from the shale era, on siting, water, and whether host counties will be paid for what they are hosting. In Washington County, Khanna sat down with residents paid to host natural gas wells under arrangements a 2020 Pennsylvania grand jury report, released when Josh Shapiro was attorney general, had flagged as a template worth rethinking (Inquirer).

That grand jury report is the bridge between the two fights. Pennsylvania already wrote the playbook for what happens when a new extractive industry moves faster than local rules: a buildout, blowback, and then a years-long fight over siting, water, severance, and what the host community is owed. Data centers are not drilling rigs, but the shape of the contest is the same. The operator internalizes the upside, the host absorbs the externalities, and the rules get written after the cranes are already on the ground.

Khanna's bill is one of three competing Democratic approaches now circulating on Capitol Hill. Sen. Ron Wyden has published a white paper proposing an excise tax on data center electricity use. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have filed the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, a much harder stop. Khanna's version, identified as H. Res. 1471, is a sense-of-the-House resolution, which means it expresses Congress's view without creating enforceable law (TechTimes).

A resolution can move the Overton window and force hearings, but it does not stop a single data center. The Khanna press release leans on figures from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to make the underlying case: more than 4,400 data center facilities in all 50 states, with hyperscale data centers projected to directly consume as much as 33 billion gallons of water annually by 2028 (Khanna press release). Those numbers are pulled from the press release rather than the underlying Berkeley Lab report.

The Pennsylvania political subtext is harder to ignore. Khanna is publicly considering a 2028 presidential run. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who as attorney general released the 2020 grand jury report Khanna is now citing, has proposed state-level data center guidelines but not a pause, and is also widely discussed as a potential 2028 contender. State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, the leading Republican challenger, has called for a pause but not an extended moratorium (Inquirer). The result is a federal bill that lands inside an open 2028 lane, on the side of the issue that does not yet have a champion in the Pennsylvania governor's office.

What the bill actually does, in current form, is force a record: where the House stands on siting near homes, on a Pennsylvania-specific pause, and on giving local governments an explicit federal backstop. Whether any of that becomes law is a separate and harder question. The next concrete test is whether the resolution gets a hearing, and whether the Wyden and Sanders-AOC tracks end up moving faster than Khanna's.