A Progress Report on the March of the Intellect

Or an Evening at a Data Center Town Hall in Southwestern Pennsylvania

Robert Seymour, The March of Intellect, ca. 1828

The first question from the audience should have been easy enough to answer. “What is a data center?” It was at this point still forgivable to think the company founder was prepared for dialogue fielded this question. Or rather there was no reason to assume he wasn’t ready to answer questions at a town hall his own company helped convene, particularly one as harmless as the first. He held out his phone like a stage prop—an invocation of the quotidian, one which the humble country folk he found himself surrounded by could surely understand—announcing that “a data center is how this works.” This was not followed by an explanation of how data are transmitted from one to the other, or how data would be stored and managed on site, or the actual scope of the proposed project (which was not just cloud storage but “AI-ready” network, cooling, and power infrastructure). The phone was instead the first item in a mental list he had apparently made of all the sorts of gadgets that data centers make “work.” Relaying this list to those in attendance eventually led him to the mysterious conclusion that “the data center is the heart of our communities.”

At no point in the evening would the audience actually receive anything like an answer to the question of what a data center is. Certainly many knew something, and many already had skepticism about data centers before they arrived at the Penn State New Kensington campus theater hosting the town hall, but the general mood of the audience seemed to mostly be confusion. Who are these people? What are they doing in our community? As I learned afterward, lack of clarity about the scope of the project was an explicitly stated concern motivating the need for a town hall. But when all was said and done, it was unlikely anyone became any wiser about what the developers of this project were up to at old Alcoa/Arconic research facility some 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

This failure to understand was not for lack of effort on the part of the audience, who had many times pressed the man on stage to fill in the gaps between the scarce project details reported in the local press, such as the much-touted plan for 3 gigawatts of on-site power generation capacity (more than the peak energy use of the entire city of Pittsburgh), or the $2 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) grant the project had received from the PA government. These points were not elaborated so much as talked around. The man on stage, for instance, first acted as if Pennsylvanian taxpayers hadn’t paid him anything, which forced the township supervisor sitting behind him to speak up and clarify that the RACP grant was on a reimbursement basis (why play dumb like this? why not just bullshit about how much more the community will get out of this modest public investment?). Others in the town hall would also ask about water usage, noise pollution, and air emissions, the sorts of controversies they had likely heard were plaguing data center projects elsewhere. This was typically met by the man on stage with some vague assertion that his company, TECFusions—a marginal, bit player in the industry, with no prior experience in GW-scale data center infrastructure—“does things differently.”

That said, it would take a while before the founder would actually allow anyone else to ask any other questions. After the inaugural non-answer, he was intent—and, I cannot stress this enough, without any provocation whatsoever—on first working himself up into a fit, as needlessly defensive as it was condescending, about the sour reputation recently garnered by data centers. He said he found it “interesting” that data centers have become such a “bogey man,” given they’ve been around since the ‘90s. Smugly, he informed the audience that there was already a data center on the Alcoa research site he acquired. About five minutes into the town hall, he already seemed exhausted at having to remind the audience of these simple, uncontroversial facts (the first of about a dozen references to “closed loop cooling systems” would arrive shortly thereafter).

“So I’m confused why I’m here.” The first lie of the night set a misplaced, indignant, combative tone which the audience did not ever come close to matching. Much to their credit, participants remained tireless in probing for questions the man on stage might actually answer. Attempting to cure him of his feigned confusion, for instance, the second person to stand up that evening acknowledged the existence of the existing data center and then tried to nail down the specific expansion plans being proposed. A question as direct, obvious, and neutral as the first, but unfortunately no less successful in retrieving a coherent response. With a—as we were quickly realizing, characteristic—touch of bombastic mystery, the man responded that he wanted to make the existing data center in Upper Burrell Township the “largest in the world.”

After this second non-answer came the longest bout of rambling of the night. Pacing around, the company founder spent the next 10 or so minutes blurting out a host of loosely connected, thinly veiled resentments about the recent notoriety surrounding data centers. “I will not hurt the environment” and “I will not hurt your community,” he insisted (again, the question, still unanswered, was about what the project did plan on doing). Shortly after that, he offered the odd insult—injuriously compounded by coming from the mouth of a muscle-bound, Florida sun-toned man, who could already barely contain his contempt for his captive audience—that this community didn’t even have any energy infrastructure that he could “ruin.”

This, after all, was the reason why he would need to build it all himself, on-site. (An aside: one particularly grating rhetorical choice was the constant reference of corporate activities in the first person, e.g. “I’ve built data centers in 56 countries.” I have preserved this stylization for immersive effect.) This would take “redundancy”—meaning, a lot of spare power capacity—but he insisted residents had nothing to worry about because all of this would be powered by natural gas, which burns “cleanly.” Really, they should all be grateful, as the project would eventually “put power back onto the grid” (probably a lie, but more on this in a moment).

It was only at this point, probably twenty minutes in, that we finally had something of an answer to the question of what the developers actually planned to do: reboot and dramatically expand the existing Alcoa/Arconic data center through the deployment of 3 GW of new, on-site, and off-grid power, to be generated by burning natural gas. While he kept confusing turbine engines and natural gas-fired reciprocating engines, it was clear from the founder’s description of equipment and from the ongoing global turbine shortage that he had to be talking about the latter. In the process, and constantly stressing their “efficiency,” he deployed a familiar tactic among AI data center developers, promoting natural gas as so much better for the environment than what existed before. “Do you know what an aluminum smelter is?” He at one point sardonically quizzed the audience with, referencing the industrial process which had excelled the Pittsburgh-headquartered Alcoa to global dominance in aluminum production (note there was never a smelter on the site TECFusions acquired).

But now to return to the claim that the project would eventually feed excess power onto the electricity grid. The plan to do so was dubious, as astutely sniffed out by the audience. When asked how exactly that would work, the man on stage suggested that it was going to be something the community would have to “push PJM to do.” In what world would it be incumbent on residents to lobby the regional grid operator for interconnection on behalf of a private data center? This fake ‘concept of a plan’ was little more than a mask of the fundamental motivation for siting the data center in southwestern Pennsylvania in the first place: easy access to Appalachian natural gas—the land TECFusion acquired from Alcoa hosts several active frac wells—which in turn will allow the project to co-locate with power generation and avoid grid dependency (and FERC regulations) entirely. And, of course, if business will indeed be booming, which is presumably the developer’s plan for the “largest data center in the world,” there will be little spare capacity to feed back onto the grid anyway.

It would be remiss not to mention jobs, the promise of which was dangled by the founder in front of the town hall participants on several occasions. Like most rural Pennsylvanian counties, Westmoreland County, where the site is located, has been bleeding jobs since the 2008 financial crisis. Its population has been in decline since the 1980s. Naturally, then, when the man on stage claimed to want to hire “a lot of people,” it elicited a number of questions from the audience about how many, what kinds of jobs would be available, and who would be receiving them. Noncommittally, he suggested having a jobs fair “on this stage” at some point in the indefinite future. When asked whether township residents would be prioritized for these jobs, he said the proper answer would be to say “yes,” but then—in a moment of what he seemed to think was straight-talking candidness—confessed he hired “based on merit” (he also mentioned “preferring” contractors). When asked how many township residents currently work for the company, he guessed “two?”, glancing back to the company’s COO, who sat behind him and didn’t say much. A period of swirling ensued, and the exact employee count was never clearly established (the answer is probably nobody).

One of the more interesting moments occurred when a young woman relayed a recent announcement that the “Department of War” was partnering with a host of big tech companies to deploy “AI capabilities” on the Department’s “classified networks.” Initially, it appeared as if she was going to ask about whether the data center planned on renting space to AI companies involved in the US war machine. This is at least what the founder seemed to think when he interrupted her with an extremely obnoxious “HOO-RAH” before she could actually get out her question. After this, the trajectory had shifted: her question ended up not being about potential complicity in the military’s atrocities at all (God knows what his answer would have been), but instead whether his plan to build the “largest data center in the world” posed a national security risk, which could render local residents vulnerable to attack.

“That’s a good question,” he conceded, momentarily stumped. The gears were turning—how to respond? The obvious answer is that there is no real threat because he was not actually going to build the largest data center in the world on the outskirts of the Pittsburgh. The hyperscalers with which the Department of War is partnering with are several orders of magnitudes larger than his company, and as the former move aggressively toward verticalization, it is increasingly unlikely they would ever have any need at all to rent space in his data center. To date, the only announced tenant of the New Kensington project is TensorWave, a $500 million-valuation startup which has taken on the particularly risky strategy of breaking NVidia’s AI compute monopoly by relying solely on AMD chips.

But of course he couldn’t admit any of that—and particularly not after making the completely preposterous claim that his data center would be so big that it would help restore “data sovereignty” to PA residents, who now had all their data stored in Virginia (one of the strangest lies of the night). In either case, this apparent moment of introspection about the national security implications of his claims was fleeting, and he quickly rebooted back into his typical condescending programming and turned to mock the woman for hypothesizing about a terrorist attack on a US data center. Bizarrely, he also felt the need to inform her that “Pete’s [Hegseth] a good friend of mine,” proceeding to compare the data center project to Israel’s Iron Dome (“This data center will protect us” in the same way the “dome around Israel is protecting Israel”), and then concluding that “if China bombs us, we got bigger problems.” Honestly, I have amnesia about how we managed to escape that particular spiral. It was one of the most baffling moments of industry-public discourse I have ever experienced (at one point during this dizzy spell the founder also mentioned upholding “Judeo-Christian values,” as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the woman referencing how Iran had already attacked data centers in US-aligned Gulf states).

Near the end of the town hall, an audience member asked the other Upper Burrell Board of Supervisors also on stage, but who had thus far said nothing, if they had any thoughts about the project they would like to share. One man responded, again with the same unearned exhaustion as the company’s founder, that it “didn’t matter what you tell a person against [data centers], nothing is going to change their mind.” But the problem was no one was even trying to tell anyone anything. One could not have possibly learned even what a data center was from attending the town hall, much less what the upsides and downsides of its local development were for residents. Beyond an abbreviated explanation of closed loop cooling systems, the founder seemed satisfied with vague gestures to using “the best technology,” at times claiming said technology had “no pollution” and “no waste,” at other times contradicting this by claiming compliance with emissions standards set by DEP (thus implying there would of course be pollution). The township supervisor seemed exasperated with all these damn questions—what one would assume is the purpose of all of our being there—insisting to attendants that they were just going to have to “trust him” on this stuff.

The cruelest irony arrived late in the evening, as a woman stood up and identified herself as an employee of Penn State New Kensington. She expressed skepticism about the suggestion, mentioned previously, that there would ever be a TECFusions “jobs fair” in that particular theater, given the branch campus is slated to be shut down next year. Clearly unaware of this, the founder scrambled to keep up the appearance of an imminent jobs boon connected to this data center. “We’ll see about that in six months.” A nonsensical premonition to cap off the night, a final insult to the intelligence of everyone in attendance who already knew Penn State’s consolidation plans were a long time coming. And of course, lest we forget, the point of the project is to chase after the AI boom, which its promoters have been constantly insisting will kill off the kinds of jobs a degree from Penn State might have once occasioned. The point is to build a big data center—the biggest in the world!—which will do nothing but hasten the collapse of rural economies and livelihoods, the total conversion of America’s hinterlands into depopulated, deteriorated wastelands of automated warehouses and resource extraction.