Middlesex Township’s planners gave an initial green light to subdivide a 693-acre tract for “Pennsylvania Digital 1,” a three-campus data center project near Carlisle.
The plan calls for 18 data center buildings plus a dedicated substation lot, with PPL saying it can support up to 1.35 GW of peak power after upgrades, which is squarely in hyperscale AI territory.
The local water authority has reserved up to 400,000 gallons per day for the site, a big cooling budget that still leaves headroom for other development but will keep water use under scrutiny.
End users are not named, but developers are targeting Big Tech cloud and AI players like Google, Amazon, or Oracle, positioning this as a potential GPU-heavy region-scale hub.
Residential neighbors are at least 1,000 feet away, yet environmental, noise, and community impacts remain unresolved and will be probed in later land development reviews.
The project promises an estimated $65 million in annual tax revenue and at least 450 jobs across ops, facilities, and engineering, which strengthens local political support despite open questions on energy and water stress.
Overall, this is an early but important signal that central Pennsylvania is trying to join northern Virginia as serious AI data center country, and the article is worth a full read for local context and constraints.
Source: Cumberland County data center project gets a first blessing from planners – pennlive.com
