Water, Power, Land and Air: How Data Centers Draw on a Community’s Resources
A data center looks quiet from the road. There are no smokestacks, few cars in the lot and almost no one coming and going. That quiet is misleading. A modern hyperscale campus is one of the most resource-hungry buildings a community can host, and what it draws on, from water and electricity to land, air and roads, is shared with everyone who lives nearby.
Northeastern Pennsylvania is finding this out in real time. More than 20 data center campuses have been proposed across the region, and Archbald alone has five complexes planned. Here is what these facilities actually use, and what it can cost the people next door.
Water
Computers produce heat, and many data centers use water to carry it away. Nationally, U.S. data centers consumed roughly 17 billion gallons of water in 2023, and hyperscale facilities are projected to use 16 to 33 billion gallons a year by 2028. A single data center can average more than 300,000 gallons a day, about what 1,000 homes use.
In Archbald, one proposal, Project Gravity, estimated about 360,000 gallons a day. Another, Wildcat Ridge, has been described as needing up to 3.3 million gallons a day, and in evaporative cooling much of that water does not come back. It leaves as vapor. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission has warned that a single hyperscale facility can use more than 5 million gallons a day, and its executive director has said the agency's concern is how quickly it is all happening.
For towns on public water, the question is whether the system can keep up. For the many NEPA residents on private wells, the stakes are more personal: heavy pumping can lower water levels in surrounding wells, sometimes miles away, in ways no one can fully predict in advance.
There are better options. Closed-loop and air-cooled systems use far less water, and at least one Archbald developer has said it will use closed-loop cooling. The point is not that every data center drains a river. It is that a community should know the answer before approval, not after.
Power
Data centers run around the clock, and the largest ones use as much electricity as a small city. The Wildcat Ridge proposal alone calls for about 1.6 gigawatts, close to the output of Pennsylvania's largest natural gas plant and enough to power more than a million homes.
That demand shows up on everyone's bill. Pennsylvania is part of PJM, the regional grid serving 13 states, where the capacity price that flows into household bills rose from about $29 per megawatt-day for 2024–25 to the capped maximum of about $329 two years later. PJM's independent market monitor attributes billions of dollars in added customer costs to data center demand. Families who will never set foot in a data center are already helping pay for them.
Land
Hyperscale campuses are enormous. The five complexes proposed in Archbald would total about 51 buildings and 13.4 million square feet, roughly 14 percent of the borough's land. Wildcat Ridge alone would occupy 574 mostly wooded acres.
Clearing that much forest changes more than the view. Trees and soil absorb rain; rooftops and pavement send it downhill, fast. That means more stormwater, more erosion and more strain on the streams and creeks that run through the Lackawanna Valley. Habitat that took decades to grow can be graded in a season.
Air
To keep running during outages, data centers install banks of diesel backup generators. Wildcat Ridge has proposed 588 of them. They are tested regularly and can all run at once in an emergency. Developers point to the strictest federal emissions tiers and state air permits. During Archbald's hearings, an independent researcher hired by residents estimated potential health damages from the campus's emissions at $3 million to $124 million a year. A permit sets a legal limit. It does not mean living next to the exhaust has no effect.
Noise
Cooling equipment hums day and night, and generator testing adds more. Residents near data centers elsewhere have reported sleep disruption, stress and headaches. In Archbald, the borough's ordinance allows backup generators to exceed noise limits during outages, emergencies and testing, an exemption that a noise expert acknowledged in court lacked scientific justification.
Roads and public services
Before a data center opens, it is a construction site, often for years. That means blasting, grading, dump trucks and concrete mixers on local roads, many of them the same routes used by school buses and ambulances. New substations and transmission lines follow. Local fire and emergency services must be ready for a type of facility most volunteer companies have never handled.
The other side of the ledger
Data centers do pay taxes, and the numbers can be significant for a small town. Archbald's borough manager has said a single facility could generate more than $4 million a year, more than 60 percent of the borough's annual budget. That is real money, and it is reasonable for local officials to weigh it.
But a fair trade starts with full information. Pennsylvania's new GRID standards, put in place by executive order in August 2026, now require developers to disclose their water use, peak electric demand and end user, to pay for grid upgrades and to win local approval before the state will consider their permits. Those are good questions for any community to ask, whether or not the state requires them.
What communities can do
Most of these impacts are decided at the local level, in zoning ordinances and public hearings. Residents can ask for water studies, generator testing schedules, noise limits at the property line, setbacks from homes and schools, construction truck routes and a plan for what happens if the facility is ever abandoned. Our resident's guide to data centers explains how the process works and which deadlines matter.
Joyce, Carmody & Moran serves as solicitor to the Valley View School District, which has asked the courts to make sure two Archbald projects near its schools go through the full public process. You can follow those cases on our Valley View case page, read our earlier article, When Something Big Comes to Town, and see all of our Community Work.
