Developers want a 2 million square foot, methane powered datacenter on the former Pennhurst asylum grounds in Spring City, where disabled residents lived until 1987. The township board said no in May.
Donald Hyman has lived long enough to know what he doesn't want three hundred feet from his window. "We don't want it, period," he says of the three-building, nearly 2-million-square-foot datacenter complex that developers want to build on the former Pennhurst asylum land, less than 600 feet from the Southeastern Veterans' Center, where Hyman and hundreds of other veterans receive care (The Guardian).
The plan would put three large datacenter halls and a methane-gas power plant on a portion of the Spring City, Pennsylvania, tract that housed the Pennhurst State School and Hospital until 1987. Pennhurst closed that year after a federal lawsuit exposed abuse and neglect of the disabled residents who lived there. Some surviving buildings now operate as a Halloween attraction; the larger grounds are the proposed datacenter site (The Guardian).
In May, the local East Vincent Township board rejected the developer's plan. The developer is appealing. That sequence, a specific plan, a specific rejection, a specific appeal, is the load-bearing material the state's larger datacenter fight is now being tested against.
For residents of the Southeastern Veterans' Center, the proximity is not abstract. The center treats veterans for post-traumatic stress, heart failure, and other chronic conditions. Hyman, who uses a wheelchair and receives care there, told The Guardian the project would compound noise, air, and traffic pressures on a population already living with serious illness (The Guardian).
The political question is whether local opposition can actually stop an AI-driven datacenter buildout. Governor Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers are now the audience for the developer's appeal, and The Guardian reports the fight is straining the usual alignments in Harrisburg, with some legislators siding with the township's rejection and others with the operator (The Guardian).
Pennsylvania is one of several states where datacenter proposals have collided with local zoning, water, and noise rules. The Pennhurst case is unusual in three ways: the disability and veterans' health history of the site, the methane-gas power generation that operators favor for AI compute loads, and a township board that has already voted no. Whether the Shapiro administration or the state legislature backs that vote, or overrides it, will determine whether May was the end of the fight or the end of the opening round.
What to watch next: the developer's appeal filing, any state preemption bill that would strip townships of zoning authority over datacenter sites, and the next public hearing at the Southeastern Veterans' Center.