Not even $10,000 per household could convince this rural Pennsylvania town to stop protesting an AI data center project

NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. But the clash over the expansion of AI data centers has taken an extraordinary turn as the local residents lodged a fierce protest against it. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was found that the developer mailed letters offering $10,000 to each of the roughly 4,500 households in Hazle Township.

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Residents are refusing to accept the payout

Despite the Pennsylvania town’s median income of $60,000, the offer has not been warmly welcomed by locals. They are not willing to budge. Faced with growing local opposition, the developer found a potential solution in a $45 million total payout to the residents of the community, plus an additional $120 million investment in the community. The checks would only be issued if the township approved the necessary zoning changes to allow the facility to be built. On top of the resident payouts, the developer dangled municipal funding packages to sweeten the pot for local leaders.


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Why are the residents protesting against data centres?

The major concerns surrounding data centres are:

• Noise pollution concerns
• Water and energy cost worries
• Dislike of AI
• Distrust of AI moguls and local authorities
• Potential negative impact on property prices

The residents openly called out the the offer as an outright bribe intended to divide the community and bypass typical environmental scrutiny. Locals said the $10,000 payment may not be enough to compensate residents if nearby data centres eventually cause local home prices to fall.

The homeowners have also raised concerns that the huge energy and water demand (for running/cooling the servers) will put a strain on the power grid, skyrocketing the utility bills and thus exhausting regional water resources. Industrial cooling systems produce a continuous low-frequency hum, something that has already sparked lawsuits from residents living near data centers in Michigan and Wisconsin, thus highlighting the fear of noise pollution.

Others argue that if they accept the money, it could put legal restrictions on residents, meaning they won't be able to lodge future complaints or sue the company over environmental degradation. In response to the locals, the Hazle Township municipality rejected the developer's requests for zoning changes. NorthPoint Development has since filed a lawsuit aiming to overturn the town's decision, moving the battle from town hall to the court system.

“$10,000 doesn’t match how much it’s going to tank my property value,” a retired teacher told the WSJ, citing the years of impending noise pollution.

NorthPoint Development is one of the country's top large-scale industrial developers and commercial real estate operating companies. Among some of its clients are Amazon, General Motors, Boeing, and Walmart.