A natural-gas data center is being planned on a parcel across the road from family homes in Armstrong County. The applicant is moving quietly through the permit process. The next public meeting decides whether this gets stopped — or starts.
A natural-gas data center is being planned on a parcel across the road from family homes in Armstrong County. The applicant is moving quietly through the permit process. The next public meeting decides whether this gets stopped — or starts.
Combined 2026 capital expenditures of the five hyperscalers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle. Three-quarters of it goes to AI infrastructure. Most of it has to land somewhere. They are looking at Western Pennsylvania.
FUTURUM GROUP · POST-Q4 2025 EARNINGS ↗Pennsylvania land currently being marketed by gas operators and infrastructure brokers for data center buildouts — including parcels in the Kiski corridor.
EMILIA DODA · TRACKDATACENTERS.COM · 2026 ↗Industry-standard target from option agreement to operational facility — behind-the-meter, bypassing the grid. They are racing against your awareness.
DATA CENTER FRONTIER · HOMER CITY COVERAGE ↗
Five structural reasons hyperscale gas-powered data centers are landing in Pennsylvania townships faster than residents can organize. Each has a source. Each is fixable — with attention.
Hyperscalers bypass PJM interconnection queues — multi-year waits — by building on-site natural gas turbines or co-locating at nuclear plants. FERC rejected the Talen/AWS amended ISA at Susquehanna in November 2024 (2–1) citing cost-shift to ratepayers. In June 2025, Talen and AWS restructured the same deal as a 1,920 MW 'front-of-the-meter' PPA through 2042 — a relabeling that takes the $18B arrangement outside FERC jurisdiction. In December 2025, FERC under new chair Laura Swett unanimously directed PJM to create three new transmission-service categories enabling co-location. The grid bypass is now an enabled feature, not a bug.
Developers tie up parcels under non-disclosure option agreements months or years before any zoning application is filed. By the time the public sees the application, the deal is mostly done. Heatmap News (April 29, 2026) documented this directly: emails obtained by Pennsylvania organizer Colby Wesner show Amazon was granted NDA-bound early access to PA's Fast Track / SPEED permitting program in April 2025, months before the program was publicly available. Minnesota has banned local-government NDAs entirely; Microsoft has publicly pledged to stop using them. PA has no such statewide requirement.
Pennsylvania's Permit Fast Track program (Executive Order 2024-04, codified at 4 Pa. Code Subchapter MMM) and the November 2025 budget law codify automatic permit approval at 30 days for air quality and 60 days for stormwater/groundwater if DEP fails to act. Under the SPEED program (June 2025), applicants can hire private engineers to perform the initial permit review — firms exempt from the PA Right-to-Know Law. Air-quality exemptions like the one PADEP granted CNX's Mamont Impoundment in 2024 allow facilities to be built without the full public hearings the full Title V process requires. Heatmap News reported in April 2026 that Amazon was granted NDA-bound early access to Fast Track / SPEED in April 2025 — months before the program was publicly available.
Pennsylvania is a strong local-control state — normally a good thing, except when applications are filed during summer or holiday seasons with minimum legal notice in townships of fewer than two thousand residents, where most adults are at work during meeting hours. PA Capital-Star (April 21, 2026) covered the PSATS panel telling supervisors to enact data-center zoning before applications arrive: under the PA Municipalities Planning Code, ordinances passed after an application is filed cannot be applied to that pending application. The window closes the moment a developer files.
West Virginia HB 2014 (signed April 30, 2025) strips counties and municipalities of authority to regulate certified data centers and microgrids 'in any way,' and diverts most revenue to a state income-tax-cut fund. The Pennsylvania mirror is three bills: HB 502 (RESET Board, with a retroactive look-back voiding residential rezoning passed since Jan 1, 2024), SB 991 (DEP preselects 15+ sites and bypasses municipal review), and SB 939 (regulatory sandbox with default approval). Pushback: Sen. Katie Muth's three-year moratorium, and Sen. Rosemary Brown's questioning posture in Northeast PA on transparency grounds. Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) — whose district contains Homer City — is holding the House regulatory package (HB 1834, 2150, 2151, 2246), preferring what he calls a 'holistic' approach.
In 1791, the federal government imposed an excise tax on whiskey — the de facto currency of the Western Pennsylvania frontier. Farmers in Westmoreland, Washington, Allegheny, and Fayette counties refused. Tax collectors were tarred. The Mingo Creek Association formed. Bower Hill was burned. Five thousand armed Pennsylvanians marched on Pittsburgh.
The fight was about whether distant capital and a distant government could extract value from the land of Western Pennsylvania without the consent of the people who lived on it.
Two hundred and thirty-five years later, a different distant capital is trying the same thing. The names this time are Knighthead Capital (New York private equity, 75% owner of the Homer City campus), Blackstone ($25B PA commitment plus a 51/49 JV with PPL to build gas plants for PJM), BlackRock and Microsoft (with the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund MGX, chaired by the UAE's National Security Adviser, riding a $40B Aligned Data Centers acquisition into PJM markets), and the Stargateconsortium ($500B announced, ~90% debt-financed, sites announced everywhere except the Pennsylvania OpenAI promised in February 2025 and quietly didn't deliver).
The Harrisburg actors who could slow this down are the ones taking the operators' PAC money. Sen. Joe Pittman— Senate Majority Leader, our senator — took $5,000 from CNX's PAC in 2019, personally endorsed the TECfusions data-center project at its January 2025 launch, personally testified for the Homer City air permit at the September 2025 PADEP hearing, and is currently sitting on the four House regulatory bills that would slow any of this down. Gov. Shapiro publicly performs ratepayer concern while Heatmap News documented that his administration granted Amazon NDA-bound early access to the Permit Fast Track program in April 2025 — months before it was open to anyone else.
Nobody is coming to save us. The federal regulators are not coming. The state legislature is the bottleneck. The county and township officials have no authority to stop what state preemption is being prepared to take from them. The people who live on the land in this corridor are it. We organize on the same ground, in the same tradition, for the same principle: we the people decide what happens here.
WE THE PEOPLE SAY NO TO THE N.W.O
“The most dangerous of all tyrannies is that which is disguised under the mask of legality… It is an intrusion upon our most fundamental rights when the power of the state is used to silence the voice of the people.”
Every name above appears in the documented public record — with donations, votes, deals, and the contradictions between what they say and what their filings show. We laid them on one page.
Five concrete actions, in order of effort. If you do one, do Show up. If you have a phone, do all five.
Sign the petition. The number that survives email confirmation is the number that goes in the public record at every meeting and every filing. Armstrong County residents are weighted double.
Call your federal delegation and your state senator — not email, call. Tell them: I oppose state preemption of local zoning, I want the four House data-center bills moved, and I expect them on the record before the next news cycle. Their offices count calls.
Print the broadside. Color or black-and-white, letter for the diner and the post office, tabloid for the fire hall. Pull the full brand kit — flyers, banner stickers, transparent logo — to print, hang, or hand out.
Out here, word travels farther through a feed store and a closed Facebook group than any algorithm. Drop the flyer in your township group. Text the video to three neighbors. Tack a sticker on the tailgate. The fight grows by who you tell next.
The next Armstrong County public meeting is Mon, June 1 at 7:00 PM EDT at South Bend Township Municipal Building. Be there. Bring your neighbor. Bring two if you can.
“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. When the People once surrender their rights, they can never regain them.”
PA officials respond to numbers. Be one of them.
It will be defended again.
Get the alert when something changes. A meeting date. A filing. A win.
We email when it matters.
Never sold, never shared.