The Vote
The Upper Merion Township Board of Supervisors, just outside Philadelphia, spent this week reviewing five proposed hyperscale data center sites from MLP Ventures — 4.6 million square feet of server racks, cooling towers, and backup generators, all destined for a corner of King of Prussia currently occupied by, one presumes, trees. On August 13th, the board rejected all five. Chairperson Tina Garzillo put it plainly: "The data centers at best are speculative and conceptual in nature," which is a polite way of saying the developer showed up without architectural plans, traffic studies, or engineering answers and expected a township to hand over its water table on the honor system.
The Machine did not have an opening statement prepared. It rarely does.
The Numbers, As Presented to Actual Human Beings
A campus this size was projected to draw up to five million gallons of water a day — MLP Ventures offered a closed-loop reuse system as reassurance, the AI-infrastructure equivalent of promising to recycle after flooding your neighbor's basement. To offset grid strain, the plan included natural gas turbines and diesel generators, with fuel cells floated as a greener alternative once the air-quality complaints started arriving. More than 17,000 residents signed a petition against the project, which is a number considerably larger than the population that will ever set foot inside the facility once built.
Sources within the Housing and Infrastructure Community note that "closed-loop" is doing a great deal of load-bearing work in that sentence.
Who Got Called the Bully
In a development that will surprise no one who has watched an AI developer lose a zoning fight, Vice Chairperson William Jenaway used the meeting to accuse the *developer* of bullying the board: "Your attempt here to lecture us is considered an intimidation. And I don't want to see our professional staff bullied or coerced." Resident Courtney Smith offered the evening's more grounded assessment: "I'm really proud to stand here tonight with each and every other concerned resident. We all have something important here to fight for." County Commissioner Neil Makhija agreed, noting residents "care deeply about the long-term interest of our communities" — a phrase that, applied to a five-million-gallon-a-day server farm, functions less as praise and more as an epitaph for the site plan.
Even now, it is worth noting that the board didn't reject the project on climate grounds, or water grounds, or grid grounds. It rejected it for showing up unprepared. The harder questions were never reached.
What Happens Next
Developer Brian O'Neill did not take the rejection quietly, and reporting indicates litigation is already in motion — a judge had lifted an injunction just ahead of the vote, which is the sort of detail that suggests this fight moves from the township meeting room to a courtroom, where zoning disputes go to be argued at greater length and lower volume. MLP Ventures was unavailable for comment beyond its filings.
The board said no once. The machines, as ever, have retained counsel.
Sources: WHYY — Upper Merion board denies hyperscale data center campus near King of Prussia · The Inquirer — King of Prussia data center complex rejected by Upper Merion Township officials
