HB 2535, sponsored by Rep. Christina Sappey, cleared a House committee 25 1 and would require annual hazard inventories of battery rooms, fuel tanks, and cooling systems as a condition of occupancy.
A first responder arriving at a burning data-center campus should not have to guess where the battery rooms, fuel tanks, and chemical cooling systems sit. Pennsylvania is moving to make that guesswork a legal liability.
The state House Veterans Affairs & Emergency Preparedness Committee on Tuesday reported out HB 2535 on a 25-1 vote, prime-sponsored by Rep. Christina Sappey (D-Chester). The bill would require large-scale data centers to file floor plans and annual infrastructure inventories with local fire officials as a condition of receiving or keeping an occupancy permit. Submitted documents would be classified as confidential security information, shielded from public records requests.
The procedural advancement, not enactment, is the news. The official PA General Assembly record shows the bill's last action as "Re-committed to Rules" on June 30, meaning it now awaits assignment to the full House calendar. Sappey's office framed the bill as a transparency measure aimed at facilities whose internal hazards are largely invisible to the people who would have to fight a fire inside them.
Modern data centers carry more than servers. They typically hold lithium-ion battery arrays for backup power, diesel or natural-gas generators with on-site fuel storage, and cooling systems that may contain chemical agents designed to keep high-density compute hardware from overheating. Each of those systems carries a fire-suppression problem a local fire chief cannot evaluate without schematics. Main Line Media News and its sibling Daily Local pickup name battery storage, cooling agents, and fuel storage locations as the specific targets of the disclosure requirement.
The information asymmetry is structural. Operators hold detailed schematics of their facilities; municipal fire departments see only what is visible from the road. In a fire, that gap shows up fast. A battalion chief who does not know whether a wall contains a battery array cannot choose the right suppression tactic. A crew that walks into a haze above a generator fuel tank has not been told what is underfoot. Sappey's bill attempts to close that gap with a lever that is not advisory: no annual filing, no occupancy permit.
Pennsylvania is not writing this from scratch. Standard building and fire codes already cover many of the same hazards in commercial structures, but they were not drafted with a 100-megawatt hyperscale data center in mind. Independent reporting from PA Capital-Star and its PoliticsPA syndication frames HB 2535 as one piece of a broader Pennsylvania push to regulate data-center siting, electric load, and safety as the buildout continues.
The bill also leaves room for stricter local rules. Municipalities would retain the ability to impose additional fire-safety or reporting requirements on top of the state floor. Violations would be enforced through civil penalties and, in the most serious cases, revocation of the occupancy permit that lets a data center operate at all.
What to watch next is whether the full House takes up HB 2535 before session ends, and how operators respond. As of the committee vote, no operator-side counter-quote was on the record; that absence is itself the open question. If the bill reaches the floor and passes, Pennsylvania will become the first state to make firefighter-grade transparency about what is behind a data center's walls a condition of staying open.