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Data Center Developer Offers Rural Pennsylvania Households $10,000 Checks to Drop Opposition

Lucas Nolan

4–5 minutes

A developer trying to build a massive data center near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, is offering nearby households $10,000 checks if the project gets approved.

Tom’s Hardware reports that NorthPoint Development wants to build a 1,300-acre data center in the Pocono foothills near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. To smooth the way, the company has offered roughly 4,500 households a $10,000 check each, payable only if the facility is approved. The offer letters started showing up in June. Hazle Township’s median household income is $60,000, so for a lot of families in the community, the payment is significant.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the offer, found residents split on the idea. Some seemed “eager to welcome the data center for the payout.” Others aren’t budging: the paper cataloged concerns about noise, water and energy costs, a general dislike of AI, and distrust of both AI moguls and local authorities. Some residents worry the facility could hurt property values.

North Point isn’t stopping at the household checks. The company has also dangled up to $120 million over the next 15 years for community and local services, money that could go toward schools, emergency services and similar investments.

Local officials have already said no to the project once. Hazle Township’s government rejected the project on zoning grounds last year and has since put a temporary moratorium on data center construction in place. The Journal reported a “raucous public meeting last year, where angry locals asked what they had to gain by supporting the data center.” That meeting looks like the moment NorthPoint decided direct cash might work where arguments hadn’t.

Whether $10,000 checks and a $120 million community fund are enough to reverse the township’s stance is still an open question. But the offer says something about where this fight is headed: a developer facing organized resistance to a big AI infrastructure project has decided the fastest way through is to write checks to the people standing in the way.

Bre itb art News recently reported that $68 billion in data center projects have been canceled or delayed in the last three months:

The projects, tracked by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence company 10a Labs, made up more than half of all new large-scale developments the group monitored during that period. Data Center Watch’s lead analyst, Miquel Vila, said opposition to the industry is broadening. “New groups continue to emerge, opposition is appearing across a wide range of states and jurisdictions, and online petition signatures continue to grow,” he said.

The numbers back that up. Data Center Watch counted 843 opposition groups spread across 49 states; Hawaii is the only state without one. About 30 statehouses have introduced or adopted rules covering data center siting, electricity use or water consumption. In Tennessee, a petition against a single data center project drew more than 500,000 signatures on Change org, more than a third of all signatures collected on the platform that quarter, according to Data Center Watch.

AI data centers and the integration of this technology is changing the political landscape. Br eitb art News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the M AG A movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.

Read more at Tom’s Hardware here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Br eitbar t News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.

I have watched a few videos of some of the data centers and the noise would make a sane person go postal.

More and more are saying that they will generate their own electricity and water will be on a closed loop. They never say anything about the noise that will be made, nonstop.

I hate the idea of losing more farm land as well. If they could pop one in the place of an old abandoned factory maybe that would appease more of the naysayers.

The hysteria over data centers is way overblown. Glad to see the builders of these things getting creative. Offer to buy town a new fire station or police station or aquatic center.

Perhaps the question of the day should be; if they are offering that kind of money to get approved than how much money do they make from these data centers and how do they make it?