On a chilly Monday just before Thanksgiving, residents of Archbald, Pennsylvania hurried from work in the fading autumn light to snag seats in the old brick Borough Building for a 5 p.m. council meeting. After the roughly 50 seats quickly filled, people continued to pack the room, standing along the walls or wedging themselves into the remaining floor space. Police officers manned the doors. Outside, latecomers huddled around a laptop in the 40-degree cold to watch proceedings on a hastily rigged livestream. On the sidewalk, someone waved a handmade sign saying “Boycott AI.”
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 — an inflection point in the race to develop ever more powerful forms of artificial intelligence — developers have been scouring the United States for places to build the giant computing clusters needed to scale up the technology. Located nine miles northeast of the city of Scranton, and home to about 7,500 people, Archbald is facing plans to build five data center complexes across six sites, making it one of the most intensely contested areas for such projects in the country, if not the world.
Backed by five real estate companies, along with the lawyers and lobbyists working on their behalf, the plans include a total of 51 data center buildings with a combined floor space of 13.4 million square feet — an area nine times the size of the U.S. Capitol. Worried residents fear the sheer scale of these mega-projects will turn their wooded Lackawanna River valley into an industrial maze buzzing with the sound of dump trucks, diesel generators, and huge cooling machines.
