(Ford Turner, The Center Square) Two powerful forces, money and silence, have been stirring hearts and minds as well as controversy in a 240-year-old township near a scenic bend of the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania.
All of it is tied to the artificial intelligence-data center boom.
Rural residential property owners in one part of Salem Township, Luzerne County, may sell out for $250,000 per acre with an additional $1 million per home. In another nearby area, the people are already completely gone. The landscape is eerily quiet, with home after home empty, boarded-up, and posted with yellow “No Trespassing” placards.
Meanwhile, the township government has signed non-disclosure agreements with two major data center entities. The documents, obtained by The Center Square via public records requests, were greeted with concern when shown to a university professor who has carried out a broad study of so-called “NDA’s” in Virginia.
“It does raise important concerns around transparency,” said Eric Bonds, a sociology professor at Mary Washington University in Virginia.
And a state lawmaker has said he will be doing some “investigation” on what has happened in Salem Township.
Bonds said one concern is that because of the NDA’s, government leaders in the township will be hesitant to speak publicly, for fear of being taken to court by an entity with massive legal resources.
Another, he said, is the wording on at least one of the NDA’s could be construed as calling for the township to show Right-to-Know requests it receives to the private entity.
“To me, that is not how government should work,” Bonds said.
For months, lawmakers in Harrisburg have talked about bills to ban such non-disclosure agreements when it comes to data centers, but none have become law.
Both of the Salem Township projects have received special state government “Fast Track” permitting status.
The first, sponsored by Amazon Data Services, is already underway. The second, sponsored by QTS Data Centers, is still in what township Supervisor John Fogg Jr. called – from a government perspective – “the planning phase.”
And, already, a private entity has pulled together land-purchase options for a third proposal in close proximity to the other two.
The entire scenario is troubling to state Rep. Jamie Walsh, a Republican who was elected in late 2024 to represent the region in Harrisburg. In particular, he pointed to the many land transactions involved in amassing large tracts for data center proposals.
“Things that have happened in Salem Township don’t seem to have been all fully transparent,” Walsh said. “I plan to do a lot more digging and investigation on this.”
In his 18 months in Harrisburg, Walsh has become one of the leading critics of how rapid data center development is playing out in the state.
A prominent figure in the land transactions has been the former, one-term state representative whom Walsh defeated by a handful of votes in 2024, Mike Cabell. In a phone interview Tuesday, Cabell said he was aware of Walsh’s positions on data centers.
“This stuff should be left up to local control,” said Cabell.
After he departed the Legislature about 18 months ago, Cabell said he worked on “land aggregation” in Salem Township in which a large number of residential properties spanning 1,700 acres were purchased and then sold to QTS Blackstone. He said he then did a one-year stint as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s director of rural development in Pennsylvania.
Now, he said, he is a principal at 4-3 Consulting, the private entity that has pulled together options that could become a third data center initiative.
The latest effort, he said, came about because of local landowners outside the outline of the first two projects who approached 4-3 about selling their land.
An application related to that third initiative – technically, a request to amend the “data center overlay” in township zoning – was filed last week, according to Cabell.
Salem, Cabell said, is “perfect” for data center development because it already hosts industry on a mass scale. Twin nuclear cooling towers poke up from the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station power plant. There are power lines, a natural gas-fired power plant, and pipelines.
What the township already has experienced, in Cabell’s view, is “nuclear towers and industrialization and noise and dirt and having spent nuclear rods stored in the middle of the township.”
Fogg, the township supervisor, described residents’ general reaction to the idea of data centers as, “You hear people say they love them. You hear people say them hate them.”
In the portion of the township with the QTS project outline, a rural road leads past a long series of empty homes, with yards that are weedy and overgrown, mailboxes hanging open, and windows boarded shut.
Cabell confirmed statements from multiple sources that in the newest initiative, property owners have agreed to options that could lead to sales of their properties for $250,000 an acre and an additional $1 million for the house.
Some residents say they love the countryside with its woods and deer, and an occasional bear rooting through the garbage, but the money is amazing. And, nobody wants to live alone next to a data center.
Township resident Laura Rinehimer, the 68-year-old retired owner of a gift shop in nearby Berwick, said “they are not forcing anyone to sell.” Her husband had an excavating business for years and so they are not hard-pressed for money, but the money from the sale of their 30-plus acres and their house will be a “nest egg,” Rinehimer said.
Lewis Canouse, a 68-year-old retiree of the logistics industry, splits his time between a home in the Philadelphia region and a Salem Township property. “The money is generational. It is enough for my children, my grandchildren, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren,” Canouse said of the potential purchase of his property. “Everybody’s moving. I’ll buy something else around here.”
Sixty-four-year-old Tammy Laubach, another neighbor, has lived in her home with her family for 36 years.
She doesn’t want to live next to a data center. But it appears everyone else will be selling their properties, she said, leaving the prospect of being a neighbor to the new industrial site.
“What can we do?” Laubach said.
