Who’s responsible when a town gets eaten alive by data centers? In Archbald, Pennsylvania, that’s the subject of a lot of debate. When I first drove up there last October, I thought I was chasing a relatively quick-turnaround story for Grist. I’d seen a brief article about a trailer park called Valley View Estates being evicted to make way for a data center. At the time, only two campuses were planned for the area. Today there are six, totaling 51 buildings that will cover 14 percent of the town.
It quickly became clear that this was a much more complicated story. Archbald is in the heart of anthracite coal territory, and a maze of abandoned mines runs beneath it. That it was about to be consumed by the tech industry’s race to create artificial general intelligence was infuriating, residents said, but not surprising. Coal barons had squeezed the area dry a long time ago, they said. Then it had become a Mafia stronghold, then a hub for warehouses and landfills.
But residents did want to know who or what had put them on Big Tech’s radar. Was it the area’s high-voltage power lines? The cheap land left behind by the mining industry? Or perhaps something more sinister—wealthy local businessmen, one with alleged Mafia ties? What started as a straightforward piece about a trailer park eviction turned into a longer and more interesting story about rumors, displacement, and Pennsylvania’s quirky zoning laws, which leave municipalities like Archbald uniquely vulnerable to AI developers.
“It seems like all these people just want money,” said Sharon Williams, who lives in Valley View Estates and is set to be evicted in less than a month. “They don’t give a shit about the people who have to live here. And that’s why I bitch.”
It’s a story you don’t want to miss.
—Rebecca Egan McCarthy
