Over the past several months, I’ve watched neighbors gather at township meetings, line front yards with protest signs, and fill social media with petitions opposing proposed data centers. The conversations are passionate. The concerns are real. And in community after community, the same question keeps surfacing: Is this the future we want? 

The more I watch these events unfold, the more I find myself wondering whether Pennsylvania has faced a debate quite like this before. The answer, I realize, might require a journey through time. 

It’s hard not to wish H.G. Wells’ fictional Time Machine really existed. One of its most fascinating journeys might not be into the distant future, but back to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. There, along the creeks and rivers of a young frontier, you would watch communities begin to take shape. Places that would grow around the promise of something better. 

At first, there might be little more than a farmer’s field and a dependable stream. To those seeking a new life in this unfamiliar land, that stream represented far more than scenery. It represented opportunity. Not because it was beautiful. Because it could work. 

Then someone builds a grist mill. Farmers begin arriving from miles around with wagons loaded with grain. A blacksmith opens a shop nearby, followed by a sawmill turning timber from the surrounding forests into lumber for homes and barns. Well-worn paths become roads. A tavern appears. Then a church. Families settle. Children are born. Before long, what had once been an isolated crossroads has become a thriving village.

That pattern repeated itself hundreds of times across Pennsylvania. Long before railroads, highways, or electric transmission lines, rivers and streams helped determine where communities would grow. Water itself wasn’t the destination. It was the source of energy that made everything else possible. 

Pull the lever forward a few decades, and the landscape begins changing. The mills are still there. The villages are prospering. But another kind of infrastructure is beginning to reshape the Commonwealth.

Men with picks and shovels carve canals across the Pennsylvania landscape, linking farms, mills, mines, and ironworks to markets hundreds of miles away. For the first time, Pennsylvania’s economy begins stretching far beyond the communities where people lived and worked.

Not far from where many of us live today, the Schuylkill Navigation changed the region. What is now a peaceful trail through Mont Clare and Oaks was once a busy commercial waterway where mule teams pulled canal boats loaded with coal, lumber, grain, and iron toward Philadelphia. Day after day, those boats connected southeastern Pennsylvania to a growing nation.

For a time, the slow, steady rhythm of mule teams along the towpath became one of the defining sounds of Pennsylvania commerce. But history rarely stands still. Pull the lever forward again, and that sound begins to fade. In its place comes another—one that would forever change Pennsylvania.

The whistle of a steam locomotive breaks through the countryside. Steel rails spread across the Commonwealth, reaching places canals never could. Communities that had once depended on waterways suddenly found themselves connected by iron instead of water. Railroads moved people, raw materials, and finished goods farther and faster than anyone had imagined. Entire towns sprang up because trains stopped there, while others slowly faded when they didn’t.

Railroads and coal soon became inseparable. One carried the other, transforming Pennsylvania into the industrial heart of a growing nation. Wherever rich seams of coal were discovered, people followed. Company towns appeared almost overnight, with homes, stores, churches, and schools built around the mines that gave them life.

Across the state, mines, massive coal-processing plants, and towering piles of coal waste soon became as much a part of the landscape as church steeples had been a century earlier. But even as coal reshaped Pennsylvania, another transformation was quietly underway.

Wooden utility poles began to appear along roads and across fields as electric transmission lines stretched from town to town. For centuries, industries had been tied to rivers because rivers supplied the power that made them work. Electricity broke that connection. For the first time, factories no longer needed rushing water at their doorstep. They could be built wherever the electric lines reached.

Pull the lever one last time, and the landscape comes rushing back to the present. The mills still stand in many Pennsylvania towns, though few still grind grain. Canal towpaths have become walking trails. Railroad stations now house museums, restaurants, or sit quietly beside abandoned tracks. The massive coal-processing plants that once thundered day and night have fallen silent. Every generation leaves its infrastructure behind. Every generation builds something new.

If a miller from the eighteenth century stepped out of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine beside a modern data center, the first thing he would notice would be what was missing. There is no rushing stream. No turning waterwheel. No wagons waiting outside. Instead, he would find an enormous, windowless building surrounded by security fencing, electrical equipment, and cooling systems. From the outside, it would seem strangely quiet. Almost empty.

He might wonder why anyone would build something so large that appeared to produce so little. The answer is that a data center isn’t a factory. It doesn’t manufacture cars or refrigerators. It doesn’t grind grain or saw lumber. Instead, it processes something every bit as valuable to the twenty-first century as flour, timber, or iron once were.

Every stored photograph. Every online bank transaction. Every movie streamed to a television. Every GPS route, credit card purchase, medical record, email, video call, and internet search has to travel somewhere. Even the question you asked ChatGPT a few moments ago was sent to computers inside a data center before an answer returned to your screen only seconds later.

Those buildings are the physical backbone of the digital world. Inside are thousands of computer servers arranged in long rows of racks. They store information, perform calculations, run artificial intelligence models, host websites, and keep the internet operating around the clock.

We casually call it “the cloud,” but there is nothing weightless about it. The cloud exists because very real buildings filled with very real computers are constantly working behind the scenes. And that work comes with an enormous appetite for power.

A modern data center can consume as much electricity as a small town. And unlike a mill that could draw its energy from the stream beside it, a data center has to bring its power in through an enormous network of transmission lines, substations, and other infrastructure.

It also needs fiber-optic networks capable of moving staggering amounts of data, along with enough land to accommodate buildings that can stretch across hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of square feet. The stream is gone. The need for power isn’t.

Those needs help explain why developers are looking at southeastern Pennsylvania. And in Limerick Township, the scale of what is being proposed makes the transformation suddenly feel very close to home.

One proposal from MCD 7 LLC would put a massive data-center campus on roughly 191 acres between the Philadelphia Premium Outlets and the Limerick Clean Energy Center. The plan calls for eight two-story buildings totaling nearly 2.8 million square feet, along with electrical substations and other supporting infrastructure.

But MCD 7 is not the only data-center proposal in Limerick. The township is now dealing with multiple applications related to the larger development. The first calls for a roughly 300,000-square-foot data-center building, with seven additional buildings planned as part of the larger campus.

And just a short distance away, in Linfield, another proposal is taking shape on the former Publicker Industries, Continental Distilling, and Kinsey Distilling properties. That project calls for a second eight-building campus totaling just under 1.8 million square feet.

Put those proposals together, and Limerick isn’t simply considering whether to allow a data center. The township is potentially looking at millions of square feet of new data centers.

That’s when the numbers begin to mean something. These aren’t abstract buildings on a planning document. They represent hundreds of acres, enormous amounts of electricity, miles of infrastructure, and a physical presence that could reshape the places where they are built. The debate is already well underway, with the projects moving through the township’s conditional-use process as residents weigh what these developments could mean for the community.

But there is another piece of the Limerick story that began before the data-center applications ever appeared.

Limerick Town Center LLC reached an agreement with the Pennsylvania Game Commission to exchange 55 acres of State Game Lands 234 and a 200-foot right-of-way in Limerick Township for 614 acres of company-owned land across Limerick, Berks, and Delaware Counties. The deal included 177 acres in Edgmont Township that would become Delaware County’s first state game lands.

The exchange wasn’t universally welcomed. Residents objected, and the Limerick Township Board of Supervisors formally opposed the deal. But the Game Commission ultimately approved the exchange by a 6–3 vote.

Limerick isn’t the only nearby community confronting this kind of development. In Upper Hanover Township, another data center is taking shape off Gravel Pike Road, southeast of Ziegler Road.

Hanover Development, LP has proposed a 150,000-square-foot data center on 37.5 acres of former farmland. The developer has owned the property since 2009, and when the application was filed, the site was already zoned for light industrial use.

Compared with the enormous campuses proposed in Limerick, 150,000 square feet may sound modest. But that is precisely what makes this project worth watching. This isn’t a massive industrial campus tucked away somewhere far from home. It is another data center finding its way into a familiar local landscape.

The project is still working its way through the development and approval process, and there isn’t yet enough information to know whether it will require its own dedicated electrical substation. It is smaller than the projects proposed in Limerick—but it is very real.

In East Vincent Township, that debate has taken on an entirely different tone. The former Pennhurst State School and Hospital property became the center of a very modern debate when a developer proposed turning roughly 125 acres at 1205 Commonwealth Drive into a nearly 1.9-million-square-foot data-center complex. The revised plan called for three buildings, along with power generation, battery storage, and a substation. The scale of the proposal—and its proximity to the Southeastern Veterans’ Center and nearby homes—quickly made it controversial.

After months of public hearings, East Vincent’s Planning Commission twice recommended rejecting the project. On May 21, the Board of Supervisors agreed, unanimously denying the conditional-use application.

The developer has indicated that it plans to appeal, so the story may not be over. For now, Pennhurst is a project the township has said no to.

Just north of Sellersville, in West Rockhill Township, the story is at a very different stage. National Land Developers has proposed a 350,000-square-foot data center on roughly 40 acres at 215 Cathill Road. The property is next to the former Teva Pharmaceutical property. The developer has purchased the land, which is zoned for industrial use, and preliminary plans have mentioned a dedicated electrical substation.

But there is an important distinction: there is no formal application before the township. For now, it is more possibility than project. Yet a project can begin taking shape long before the public is sitting in a hearing room deciding whether it belongs there. And the farther the circle reaches, the harder the numbers become to ignore.

In Upper Merion Township, developer MLV Ventures is seeking approval for a five-site data-center campus around Renaissance Boulevard in King of Prussia and West Conshohocken. Together, the proposed sites would contain more than 4.5 million square feet of data-center space and could require between 500 and 900 megawatts of electricity.

The scale has brought hundreds of residents to planning meetings, turning what might ordinarily be routine proceedings into lengthy and often contentious discussions. At a July meeting that lasted four hours, the Planning Commission declined to recommend approval of the first three locations and postponed consideration of the remaining two.

The project remains under review. Unlike Pennhurst, where the township has already said no, Upper Merion is still deciding how much of this new industry it is willing to accommodate.

In Plymouth Township, the question has moved beyond planning and into a legal dispute over a proposed data center on a former steel mill property at 900 Conshohocken Road. Developer 900 Conshohocken LLC is seeking a special exception to build there after an earlier application was withdrawn.

The proposal remains before the township’s Zoning Hearing Board, but the township itself has taken a position against it, citing concerns about the potential impact on the health, safety, and welfare of residents. The public hearing began in June and has continued through the summer.

In July, another layer was added when the township received a Substantive Validity Challenge—a legal action questioning the zoning rules themselves. The matter is separate from the pending special-exception application and will have to go through its own Zoning Hearing Board process.

In East Whiteland Township, the question has already been answered—at least in part. Along South Bacton Hill Road near Swedesford Road, a property once home to the Foote Mineral Company was contaminated enough to receive Superfund designation. The site was later remediated and approved for a retirement community that was never built.

Now, Sentinel Green Fig LLC is developing the property as a data center. The original plan called for two buildings totaling roughly 887,000 square feet, but earlier this year, the developer sought to expand the project to about 1.7 million square feet. After months of opposition, that request was withdrawn, and the developer returned to the previously approved project. And now, it’s being built.

From a 150,000-square-foot building off Gravel Pike to a potential 4.5-million-square-foot campus in Upper Merion, the numbers can be difficult to comprehend. But behind every number is a piece of land, a road, a power line, a neighborhood, and a community that has to decide what comes next.

For the communities where these projects are proposed, the questions are immediate: How much electricity will they require? Where will that power come from? What will they mean for water, roads, noise, and the surrounding landscape? And how much change is a community willing to accept in exchange for the promise of new development?

Pennsylvania has faced those questions before. When canals crossed the countryside, when railroads reached new towns, when factories rose beside quiet fields, communities had to decide what the future was worth.

A grist mill once represented that future. Now, perhaps, the data center does too. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it has a way of asking the same questions in different forms.

If H.G. Wells could step from his Time Machine into Pennsylvania today, the buildings might astonish him. The debate probably wouldn’t.