Pittsburgh250 — This story is part of a Pittsburgh Media Partnership collaborative reporting project exploring how Southwestern Pennsylvania communities are marking America’s 250th anniversary — and how local history continues to shape civic life today. Technical.ly, City Cast Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s Public Source teamed up to explore the region’s economic horizons.
When the Edgar Thomson Works opened in 1875, few could have imagined that Southwestern Pennsylvania would one day be dotted with former steel mill sites, now called brownfields, in states of repair and reuse. As the new industrial revolution of AI data centers sweeps the region, it’s just as difficult to crystal ball its effects on the landscape and environment.
Over the next 150 years, some environmental advocates and researchers say Southwestern Pennsylvania could see a deluge of hyperscale data centers — those that cover 10,000 square feet and typically use at least 100 megawatts of electricity. They worry that the facilities will siphon large quantities of local energy and are concerned about effects on water supplies.
As these resources are pushed to their limits, though, a full transition to clean energy could be in store for the future. The data center buildout could also turn out to be narrower than anticipated, as operators focus on “right-sizing” their operations in anticipation of a bursting artificial intelligence bubble.
Poised for growth, but with caution
High-quality coal and river access drove the development of mills and steel towns, and history may be repeating itself.
Yvonne Sorovacu, an environmental scientist at ProtectPT, said she imagines a future in which little separation exists between data centers and the power generation sites that power them, particularly in rural areas. Established in 2014, Protect PT advocates against fossil fuel activities in Westmoreland and Allegheny counties. In Westmoreland County’s Upper Burrell Township, she said fracking well pads could surround the proposed data center campus there in the future.
“When you think about that build out, I think about Texas and I think about the landscape there and what it looks like from space, and I’m like, ‘Prepare for parts of our counties to look like that,’” she said.
More than 4,300 data centers, or facilities that store servers and offer computing services, dot the country. Virginia, home to over 600 data centers with another 500+ in planning, is considered the “data center capital of the world.” Other top data center hubs sit in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, California and Illinois, said Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, a membership group for data center operators.
The energy demand for data centers in the U.S. will triple by 2030, according to some estimates. As the industry quickly grows in the near term to fill demand, Diorio said the commonwealth has stood out as a tertiary market — far behind Virginia or Texas, but also “one of the strongest growing markets out there.”
Pennsylvania doesn’t publicly track data centers, but some estimates show roughly 130 data centers are operating, proposed or under development. At least 12 sites are planned for Southwestern Pennsylvania, according to the Data Center Proposal Tracker.
View the interactive map. (Source: Data Center Proposal Tracker)
The commonwealth’s well-established energy industry could make it the next hotbed of hyperscale data centers, said Lauren Posey, an environmental policy advocate for ProtectPT. Only Texas bests the commonwealth in natural and shale gas production, and Pennsylvania outranks all other states in its number of operating coal-fired power plants.
The next few decades, however, will be marked by data center operators “right-sizing” their infrastructure, Diorio said. Broad concerns of an AI bubble loom over his members’ heads, and future buildouts will be informed by demand.
“You don’t wanna underbuild because then you’re not meeting demand, but you don’t want to overbuild because then you have a stranded asset where you’re not providing a service and you have infrastructure still on the ground that you spend billions of dollars in capital on,” he said.
Karen Feridun, a co-founder of the renewable energy advocacy group Better Path Coalition, said some global markets are already scaling back their hyperscale data center production.
“There have already been examples in China, among other places, where they’re scaling it down so much, that this kind of massive, hyper-scaler that’s gonna take up football fields worth of space … that’s just not gonna be necessary,” she said.
“I think that we’re gonna end up with a lot of stranded assets.”
Energy limits may compel clean power
Rob Altenburg, PennFuture’s senior director for energy and climate, said building more power generation only to meet the demands of increasingly large data centers won’t be sustainable over the long run — in the same way that additional lanes on a highway won’t cure traffic issues.
“You can’t build your way out of a congestion problem. You have to plan your way out of it, and the [electrical] grid works a lot the same way,” he said. PennFuture is an environmental advocacy organization.
He noted that data centers still face a comparatively energy-efficient competitor.
“The human brain uses about 20 watts, so you can do intelligent things with a lot less power,” Altenburg said. “This is the big engineering problem: How do we make these big things use much less power to accomplish their goals? I think that’s probably gonna be a trend, but we’re not heading [in] that direction yet.”
Central processing units, as well as graphic processing units, serve as the brains of data centers. Several of the small pieces of hardware are stored in servers to carry out general computing, graphics processing and AI-related tasks.
Researchers are increasingly finding ways to make these chips more efficient, and a new market of local startups are finding early success from building more efficient AI chips or energy-saving coding techniques.
While the commonwealth’s Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) Standards don’t require data centers to use less energy, they do require operators to commit to building or purchasing their own electric energy before taking advantage of tax credits and permit fast-tracking programs.
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The state will need to produce cheaper forms of energy, such as wind or solar, Altenburg said.
Julie McNamara, the director of federal energy policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, also predicts the country’s future energy generation will be “unequivocally clean.” The group researches and advocates for policies related to climate change. McNamara said the future could also present new renewable energy options that extend beyond what exists today.
Companies known for utilizing hyperscale data centers — Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon included — have already been contracting increasing amounts of clean energy. The four companies now collectively contract around 135 gigawatts of clean energy, five times more than they did just four years ago.
Water use may drop
Pennsylvania’s waterways still carry raw materials to mills as they’ve done since the industrial revolution. In this revolution they serve a different, critical function by supplying water to cool data centers.
Most small-scale data centers — such as the ones that dot Pittsburgh’s North Shore and Downtown — use air to cool their servers, while hyperscale data centers often use water instead in order to save energy.
The Susquehanna River Basin Commission in March modified its agreement with Amazon Data Services regarding its daily “consumptive use” — meaning the water never returns to its source — of 129,000 gallons in Luzerne County’s Salem Township. For comparison, the average restaurant consumes around 300,000 gallons of water in a single year. Another data center proposed for nearby Hazle Township would use 67,000 gallons of water daily if approved by the commission.
Most power generation plants also need water to cool off, creating a data center-driven “double hit” on the water supply, Altenburg said.
Diorio, however, said that data center operators “don’t get a pass on any water discharge or water use, water intake… We have to follow the same rules that any other development follows.”
He pointed to a study conducted by Arizona State University in which researchers found data centers there consume less water than beverage and semiconductor producers.
More efficient water uses are already emerging. The data center slated for Springdale Borough, for instance, plans to use a closed-loop system that requires only an initial withdrawal of water equivalent to an Olympic swimming pool. Newer techniques also directly cool down processors rather than submerging entire servers in water.
Still, the state’s water suppliers, electric grids and ratepayers will hit their limits at some point, Altenburg said, pushing data centers to become ever more efficient.
Near-term concerns of pollution, health risks
McNamara said she’s most concerned about what happens in the interim.
“I think that 150-year ballpark is incredible to imagine, that future place. But I worry so much about the near-term years to come. There is so much at stake in these next few years.”
In addition to potentially straining local energy and water supplies, data centers can cause air pollution by running on-site, gas-fired turbines. The resulting noise pollution can also affect nearby people and wildlife.
And when “you have dirty, noisy businesses, you usually have an environmental justice issue,” Altenburg said, “because they tend not to put them in the wealthy neighborhoods.”
There are also indirect effects, such as air pollution from off-site power generation sites and harm to organisms that live in the waterways from which water is extracted for industrial use.
“There is so much at stake in these next few years.”Julie Mcnamara, director of federal energy policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists
But similar to how operators must follow water use regulations, Diorio said that they must also follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations for backup generators and other on-site power infrastructure.
In its latest report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program noted communities living near oil and gas extraction sites would face increased health issues in the future. Previously mandated by Congress, the research program produced annual reports on climate change. An industry-wide effort to reduce emissions could still leave those communities burdened with pollution, according to the report.
Data centers proposed near Pittsburgh, including the Homer City campus, are primarily expected to use natural gas to fuel their operations.
The state has already revived old power generation sites to support new data centers. Even if a complete transition to renewable energy occurred tomorrow, remediating land where oil infrastructure used to exist poses a major financial hurdle to states such as Pennsylvania, McNamara said.
“The past is shouting at us: ‘Don’t do this again. We’ve made this mistake before.’”
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Emma Folts.
