Philadelphia Residents Push Back Against AI Data Centers
People who lived through the refinery era don't want a replay. Now they're fighting plans that haven't even been filed yet.
Key points
- Over 100 residents rallied at Philadelphia's City Hall on Monday against potential AI data center construction.
- Fears centre on pollution, noise, and water and electricity demand, rooted in the neighbourhood's refinery history.
- City officials have flagged two potential sites, one in the Grays Ferry neighbourhood where the refinery once operated.
- A BloombergNEF projection puts U.S. Data center natural gas consumption above Germany and Japan combined by 2035.
Philadelphia is seeing organised resistance before a single planning application has been filed. On Monday, more than 100 people turned out at City Hall for the launch of the No Data Centers in Philly campaign, led in part by Shawmar Pitts, a lifelong Grays Ferry resident who grew up beside what was then the East Coast's largest oil refinery, shuttered after an explosion in 2019.
Pitts now serves as managing co-director of environmental justice group Philly Thrive. His personal experience shapes everything about his opposition. "I read the information they had on the table about how living near the refinery affects you, and I'm looking at all the sicknesses on this paper, and I'm like, 'My mother has this, my sister has that, my next-door neighbor suffers from this', every house, someone has something on that list," he told TechCrunch. "From that point, I was all the way in."
Why are residents worried?
Community memory is the engine here. Sonya Sanders, Philly Thrive's board president, lost her husband to a rare bone cancer in 2020. He'd lived in Grays Ferry too. "In my eyes, they killed him," she said at the rally. "The pollution killed him."
Her message about the proposed facilities was blunt: "We don't want data centers. We don't want the pollution, we don't want the noise, and we know they're not going to bring us more jobs."
The resource numbers add weight to her words. BloombergNEF forecasts that by 2035 U.S. Data centers will burn more natural gas than Germany and Japan together, nearly double the firm's own projection from nine months ago. Clean Air Council attorney Annie Fox put a local face on that figure at the rally: a typical Pennsylvania data center carries hundreds of diesel engines, she said, and during heatwaves the grid operator may tell operators to run them rather than draw public power.
As we reported in our water-use deep-dive on 27 August, the resource demands of these facilities are real and the numbers companies share are sparse.
What actions are being taken?
Moratoriums are spreading. Denver, Indianapolis, Asheville, Charlotte, and Reno have each approved temporary pauses to gather more information. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order blocking new permits for large projects. "Progress shouldn't arrive with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution," she said. And a New York Times/Siena poll we covered on 16 September found 61 percent of likely voters opposed to new data center construction near them.
Philadelphia has no formal proposals yet, but officials have identified two candidate sites. One is in Grays Ferry. That's what lit the fuse.
Common questions
What is the primary concern with AI data centers?
Residents' core worries are emissions, diesel noise, and the drain on water and electricity that communities already rely on.
Are there any benefits to building data centers?
Proponents cite jobs and local tax revenue, but in Grays Ferry those promises land differently when weighed against decades of industrial health damage.
What is the status of data center projects in Philadelphia?
No formal proposals exist yet. City officials have identified two possible sites, and that's been enough to trigger a formal campaign against them.
