About 40 people attended a discussion on artificial intelligence data centers in the Lehigh Valley hosted by Lehigh University and Lehigh Valley Public Media on Thursday.
The conversation brought together local leaders, professors, community members and environmental advocates to discuss who benefits from AI data centers, the costs they present and their impact on residents’ quality of life.
Jill Seitz, the chief community and regional planner at Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, began the conversation by defining a data center.
“High-level data centers are the physical buildings that store servers that manage all the data that goes behind the technology that we’re using every day,” Seitz said. “They can be as small as a closet that would be within an office building and serve a business locally, scaled all the way up to the hyperscale facilities.”
Brittany Sweeney, the host of the conversation, said there are about 4,000 data centers operating in the U.S., including more than 100 in Pennsylvania.
Abby Smith, the president and CEO of Team Pennsylvania, said the state is a high-consideration location for data centers. She said companies considering locations for data centers are closely evaluating Pennsylvania because of its significant energy infrastructure.
She said there are questions about whether Pennsylvania’s current grid infrastructure can handle increased activity from data centers, as well as concerns about the state’s economic benefit compared with potential negative impacts on local communities. She said a balance must be struck in identifying appropriate locations.
“I don’t think that data centers are going to be right for every pocket of the commonwealth,” Smith said. “I will say that a lot of Pennsylvania energy is used in the broader region, and we’re going to need critical build-out of infrastructure in order to meet this moment.”
Seitz said the approval timeline for prospective data centers can take a long time, sometimes up to two years.
Reaching the construction stage, she said, can take a significant amount of time, particularly for hyperscale facilities, because of the extensive state permitting involved. Between municipal approval and securing permits from the Department of Environmental Protection and other required agencies — depending on the proposal — it can take several years before construction begins.
During the discussion, organizers showed a video featuring select community members’ reactions to potential data centers in the Lehigh Valley. In the video, residents voiced opposition to building centers in the area and said they don’t believe the region has the resources to support them. They also raised concerns about energy consumption and associated costs.
Alberto Lamadrid, an economics professor at Lehigh and member of the Integrated Networks for Electricity Research Cluster, presented on the impact of AI data centers’ electric demand on residents’ utility bills.
He said data centers require a lot of energy, noting that AI systems such as ChatGPT and Gemini require three to 10 times as much energy as a Google search.
“People are using these (AI models) millions of times per hour,” Lamadrid said. “For a data center, they are doing responses in their hardware, which are going to be responding to these millions of queries. So, you’re going to need hundreds of megawatts.”
Lamadrid said PJM Interconnection LLC, the regional power grid and wholesale electricity market for Pennsylvania and other states, influences utility prices.
He said rising demand in PJM electricity markets could push prices up in the short term, especially as available generation tightens. While additional supply could stabilize costs in the long run, Lamadrid said protections would be needed for vulnerable households if prices spike.
Danielle Friel-Otten, a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and the Environmental Resources and Energy committee, discussed how environmental protections intersect with data center development. She said groundwater, clean air and natural resources can be at risk when facilities are built in certain areas.
Friel-Otten said she and other lawmakers are working on bills to ensure AI data centers cover more of their own costs. House Bill 1834 would establish a separate tariff structure placing data centers into their own classification. She said facilities that exceed certain megawatt usage thresholds — which are still being determined — would be categorized as “large load” users, with costs contained within that designated rate structure.
Smith acknowledged the potential economic benefits of data centers and said she doesn’t want Pennsylvania to “miss out.” She said the Lehigh Valley has built a reputation for innovation at the state level.
“For whatever it’s worth, the Lehigh Valley has that reputation of an innovation corridor,” she said. “There is so much that happens here. The Lehigh Valley is constantly punching above its weight, and that’s something I see reputationally. It’s something that I’m proud of, as somebody who was born here.”