Why Empty Fields Could Attract Data Center Developers

East Cocalico Township faces a challenge that resembles a golden opportunity. Wide-open fields, modest land costs, and proximity to the infrastructure corridors feeding the northeastern United States have caught the attention of at least one local official — and where officials notice, developers eventually follow.

Township officials have already flagged the reality plainly: East Cocalico has "a lot of empty fields" that could entice a data center developer. That's not a casual observation. It's the kind of signal that, in the current infrastructure investment climate, tends to move quickly from conversation to construction permit.

What East Cocalico Actually Offers

Lancaster County's East Cocalico Township sits in a part of Pennsylvania where agricultural land still dominates the visual landscape — but the underlying economics are shifting. Large, flat parcels with room for the footprint a hyperscale or mid-tier data center demands are increasingly rare within 100 miles of major metro markets. East Cocalico still has them.

The scarcity of shovel-ready land near population centers is one of the most underappreciated constraints on data center growth right now. Sites that check every box — acreage, grid access, fiber proximity, and reasonable permitting environments — are being snapped up faster than the industry can build on them. Rural townships in Pennsylvania's interior are starting to look attractive precisely because Northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Chicago are running out of room.

Current zoning in much of East Cocalico is oriented toward agricultural and low-density residential use, which means any serious data center development would require rezoning or a conditional use process. That's not unusual. It's also not a dealbreaker — developers with experienced land use counsel navigate these processes routinely. What matters is whether local government is willing to engage, and the fact that township officials are publicly discussing data center potential suggests the door is at least open.

Why Rural Fields Have Become Prime Digital Infrastructure Real Estate

A decade ago, the conventional wisdom said data centers needed to cluster near cities — close to end users, close to talent, close to fiber hubs. That logic hasn't disappeared, but it's been heavily qualified.

Latency requirements for most enterprise workloads — cloud storage, backup, batch processing, AI training runs — don't demand sub-5-millisecond proximity to end users. A facility in rural Lancaster County can serve Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore without meaningfully degrading performance for the vast majority of applications. Only the most latency-sensitive edge computing use cases require downtown real estate.

What rural locations *do* offer is substantial: lower land acquisition costs, cheaper construction labor, access to substations with available capacity, reduced competition for permits, and — critically — more room to scale. A data center developer building a 50MW initial phase wants to know there's land adjacent for a 200MW expansion. Urban infill sites rarely offer that.

Power is the real bottleneck, and rural Pennsylvania's grid infrastructure, built to serve industrial and agricultural loads, often has capacity that suburban markets exhausted years ago.

Water access matters too. Data centers consume enormous volumes of water for cooling — a mid-sized 100MW facility can use millions of gallons annually. Agricultural townships with existing water rights and municipal water infrastructure represent a genuine advantage over sites where water infrastructure needs to be built from scratch.

The Investment Case for East Cocalico

Developers evaluating East Cocalico for data center investment aren't looking at a single parcel — they're underwriting a market position. The question isn't just "can we build here?" but "will this location hold value as the regional data center ecosystem matures?"

The numbers in the broader sector support serious attention. Data center construction in the United States has been running at record pace, with industry analysts tracking over $200 billion in global data center investment annually as of the mid-2020s. Pennsylvania has emerged as a secondary market of genuine interest — not just because of land availability, but because of the state's energy mix, existing fiber routes, and tax incentive structures that some municipalities have used to attract infrastructure investment.

For a developer, the ROI calculus on a greenfield rural site typically hinges on three variables: land cost per acre relative to competing markets, utility interconnection costs and timelines, and the local tax environment. East Cocalico's potential advantage is in the first two. Agricultural land in Lancaster County trades at a fraction of what comparable acreage costs in Loudoun County, Virginia — the world's densest data center market — and utility interconnection in less congested rural areas frequently moves faster than in markets where every substation is already queued.

The risk, as with any emerging data center market, is liquidity. Institutional capital has concentrated in proven clusters. A developer betting on East Cocalico is partly betting that regional market dynamics shift enough to validate a location that hasn't been tested at scale. That's a real risk — but it's also where the upside lives for investors willing to move before consensus forms.

Development Challenges That Can't Be Glossed Over

Honest analysis requires acknowledging the friction points, and there are several.

Zoning conversion from agricultural use isn't just a legal process — it's a political one. Neighboring landowners, agricultural preservation advocates, and environmental groups in Lancaster County have historically been active participants in land use decisions. Pennsylvania's farmland preservation programs are among the strongest in the country, and land enrolled in those programs isn't available for development regardless of market interest.

Environmental review for a large data center will scrutinize stormwater management, impervious surface impacts, noise from cooling equipment, and diesel generator emissions from backup power systems. These aren't insurmountable issues, but they add time and cost to the development timeline. Developers who underestimate community engagement requirements in townships like East Cocalico tend to create their own obstacles.

The developers who succeed in emerging rural markets are almost always the ones who engage local officials and residents early — not after permits are filed.

Grid interconnection timelines deserve particular mention. PPL Electric Utilities serves much of the region, and interconnection queues in PJM — the grid operator covering Pennsylvania — have lengthened considerably in recent years as demand from data centers, EV infrastructure, and manufacturing competes for capacity. A developer should plan for interconnection timelines of two to four years on a large project and should commission a serious power study before acquiring land.

What Comes Next for East Cocalico

The township's recognition that empty fields could attract data center developers is a starting point, not a destination. The path from that observation to a functioning facility involves years of planning, negotiation, and capital deployment. But the trajectory of the broader market makes it increasingly likely that someone will make that journey.

AI compute demand is the accelerant that changed the calculus. The training and inference workloads powering the current wave of AI products require data center capacity at a scale that existing infrastructure can't satisfy. Every hyperscaler — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta — has announced aggressive expansion plans measured in gigawatts, not megawatts. That demand has to land somewhere, and markets like East Cocalico are on the list of possibilities in a way they simply weren't five years ago.

For the community, the stakes cut in multiple directions. Data center development brings significant tax ratables, typically with low demands on municipal services compared to residential or retail development. A single large facility can generate millions in annual property tax revenue with a handful of full-time employees. That's appealing to township finances. Whether it aligns with East Cocalico's character and agricultural heritage is a separate question — and one that residents, not developers, should drive.

The opportunity is real. The land is there. The demand is real. What happens next depends on whether local leadership and potential developers can find terms that work for both.

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