The chair of the planning commission in Upper Merion Township, a suburban town about 20 miles from Philadelphia, began a long-anticipated meeting to discuss a large-scale data center proposal with a warning befitting the middle school auditorium where it was held.
Don’t get rowdy, Matt Popek told a packed house. Anyone who disrupts the proceedings will be kicked out. “We recognize there are many strong feelings,” he said.
No one was ever asked to leave Wednesday’s marathon four-hour meeting, though there were plenty of disruptions. Shouts, boos, applause, chants, and groans filled the room.
“Look at everyone in this room. This is not a divided issue. This is everyone,” one public commenter said after asking everyone opposed to stand up. The packed auditorium roared. “This is an entire community united against hyperscale data centers.”
The jeers were directed mostly at Brian O’Neill, the Philadelphia real estate magnate behind MLV Ventures, a venture capital firm, who has proposed building a sprawling AI data center campus in Upper Merion Township that would occupy over 4.5 million square feet across five sites and require between 500 and 900 megawatts of electricity, which would make it one of the largest data centers in the Northeast.
The sheer size, along with environmental concerns and what some consider a lack of transparency around the project, have angered many of the town’s residents since they learned about it earlier this year.
Courtney Smith, a member of Upper Merion Against Data Centers, a local activist group, told Business Insider that the development has brought together people of all kinds to resist it.
“If the voice of the community doesn’t matter, then where are we? Where are we society-wise?” Smith said. “At some point, the voice of the community has to hold some weight.”
Joe Lamberti for BI
Upper Merion Township is one of countless towns across the country resisting the huge data centers required to power the AI products developed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others.
In most of these communities, the opposition is playing out inside townhalls, schools, and community centers, where public planning meetings that typically happen in front of sparse crowds are drawing hundreds. I saw that firsthand on Wednesday in Upper Merion Township.
The meeting was, in a word, testy. It got combative when O’Neill and his team argued with town officials about the project’s details — or lack thereof. There was plenty of snark, sarcasm, and a whole lot of finger-pointing.
A packed house
Joe Lamberti for BI
Despite the summer humidity, people began arriving around 5 p.m., an hour before the auditorium doors opened to the public and two hours before the meeting was scheduled to begin. Data center opponents of all ages and backgrounds stood outside the auditorium’s entrance, passing out signs and stickers admonishing the proposed development.
One woman I spoke to, Jen Rae, is a longtime resident. She said she lives near one of the proposed sites and is concerned about noise pollution. A common complaint about large data centers is that they can emit a maddening hum.
At first, residents arrived slowly. By 6 p.m., about 35 people were seated in the expansive auditorium, making me wonder whether the pushback against data centers in Upper Merion had fizzled since the last meeting in May.
By the time it began, however, the auditorium was packed.
Joe Lamberti for BI
Applause, boos, and an elusive PowerPoint
It wasn’t hard to determine which side the vast majority of attendees took on the issue. When the planning commission called out the developers, the crowd cheered. When the developers spoke, they were heckled.
“Stop with your smirk,” one public commenter told O’Neill after she expressed concern about noise levels. “The issue is not that there shouldn’t be data centers. There should be data centers. They just shouldn’t be built near residential communities.”
At the heart of the issue was transparency. Following May’s meeting, the planning commission and residents expected the developers to arrive with a detailed breakdown of the data center project. The developers, for their part, said they felt the commission was asking for information not required at this early stage.
When asked, the developers said they would answer all of the residents’ questions. Ultimately, though, they didn’t.
O’Neill’s team said they had submitted a PowerPoint outlining the project details, but the planning commission never displayed it. The planning commission said it couldn’t because the developers submitted the PowerPoint “10 minutes” before the meeting began.
That absent PowerPoint became a running punchline throughout the four-hour meeting. When the commission asked for clarification about a detail, the developers would often shrug.
“I don’t remember because I don’t have our PowerPoint,” O’Neill said at one point during a discussion about noise levels, eliciting one of the night’s biggest groans from the public. He said that “from memory,” the data center would emit about 50 decibels, which he said was “interesting” because it was the equivalent of “a quiet suburb.”
The elusive PowerPoint became such a go-to answer that the crowd began anticipating it.
Joe Lamberti for BI
“It’s too bad you don’t have the slides to back that up,” one planning commission member said wryly.
Both residents and the planning commission were frustrated. As a reporter, I understood. I was annoyed by the lack of answers, too.
In the end, following the public comment section, the planning commission announced it would not recommend that the local Board of Supervisors accept the developer’s application for the first three locations. The planning commission said it would debate the two final locations in August.
Applause filled the room a final time.
