By Sean Guay
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — Today I attended the PA Chamber 2025 AI Summit at the Harrisburg University Heath and Science Tower, featuring an array of speakers, including Senator Greg Rothman who discussed improving public support for Data Centers in Pennsylvania.
Speaking just before lunch break, Rothman said, “It’s up to us. We need to do a better job talking about this. I was at a dinner where Senator John Fetterman and Senator Dave McCormick were talking and John Fetterman said, he was talking about his party, he said, “Too many in my party think you just plug in and electricity comes from the outlet.” I also have a legislative friend who said too many of his kids in the inner city think that food comes from the grocery store.
“We have to be honest about compute. If you don’t want data centers then you have to stop using waze, and stop using cloud, and stop using online banking, stop asking google questions because all that requires compute. When we explain that to people, then everyone is going to say of course I want a water treatment plant in my community, of course I want electrical power, because I want the electricity, I want the water, I want the power, because I believe that power equals freedom and freedom is what makes us special in America. So, we need the compute, we need to educate our kids, and educate our neighbors and friends, and maybe over Thanksgiving talk about all the compute we use and how data centers provide that.
“Clearly the natural gas industry, which has cleaned up our environment and has provided cheap, affordable, clean energy has also been vilified, and fossil fuels, which has doubled our life expectancy of human beings, gets vilified. I think we have a responsibility to talk about it and explain that this is a good thing and we need more of it.”
Harrisburg100 
The AI bubble is about to burst. The return on investment from AI is far less than the Silicon Valley start ups when the DOT COM bubble popped in 2000. Soon this will not be an issue.
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I find it interesting to see some of our legislators and others pushing for data centers without providing the facts about how these behemoth structures will affect us, short term and long term. I have nothing against the data center concept, per se, but I think many of us have concerns about what do these massive centers bring to our communities. In other words, what are the pro’s and con’s these centers bring us. Maybe data centers are the answer to our power needs, maybe not. They are certainly being pushed and in fact, some big land owners in my township have been contacted and in some cases, harassed into discussing sale of their land. Township officials are even being contacted by developers with the goal of getting their feet in the door. Nothing wrong and nothing illegal about this but doesn’t this run up a red flag? Some of these data center developers and representatives live out of state and I’m not really sure that our community concerns will seriously be considered. I don’t think it is too much to ask our legislators to provide us FACTS, real facts about data centers.
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