Allentown, Lehigh County — The Allentown Planning Commission approved a 75-megawatt data center plan yesterday, bucking public opinion after a months-long opposition campaign from residents. The City Council must issue the final decision.

The vote comes two months after Allentown City Council passed a data center ordinance and Quantm LLC withdrew their initial data center application before resubmitting a version in accordance with the ordinance. Data center opponents and residents do not feel the restrictions are protective enough and fear rising electricity bills, environmental impacts, and noise pollution from the project.

Polling from Quinnipiac University this summer found that 74 percent of Pennsylvanians oppose AI data center construction in their community.

Alex Beauchamp, Northern Regional Director for Food & Water Watch, issued the following statement:

“On a Tuesday afternoon while people were at work, the Allentown Planning Commission ignored the widespread opposition to this data center in a hushed vote. After months of pushback, the commission could have prevented this project from moving forward — they simply chose not to.

“The vote is a gut punch to every impacted resident; the City Council must step in and right these wrongs. Developers want us to believe data centers are inevitable. They are not. Communities don’t have to become testing labs for Big Tech’s AI experiment — and they don’t want to. Allentown City Councilors must step up to the plate to prioritize their constituents, not corporate developers and reject this proposal immediately.”

A Food & Water Watch report lays out the wide range of harms and hazards associated with the sudden explosion of the data center industry in the United States, including:

• Annual water usage equivalent to 18.5 million households by 2028; annual electricity usage equivalent to 55 million households by 2028.
• Dangerous new demand for fossil fuels, posing heightened risks of air and water pollution for impacted communities and a grave threat to our global climate.
• A host of other societal threats, from national economic catastrophe, to loss of critical farmland, to unrelenting noise pollution, to threats to children and democracy.