Will New Zoning Laws Shift Data Center Development?

When over 100 people show up to a planning commission meeting in a township most Americans couldn't place on a map, something significant is happening. That's exactly what occurred in Conewago Township on October 27, 2025, when residents, landowners, and developers packed the room to weigh in on a proposed zoning ordinance targeting data center development. The turnout alone speaks volumes about how high the stakes feel on the ground.

Data centers have become the unglamorous backbone of the digital economy — massive, power-hungry facilities that process everything from cloud storage to AI inference workloads. They need land. Lots of it. And increasingly, they're finding that land in smaller municipalities that weren't built to handle them, legally or practically. Conewago Township's attempt to get ahead of that wave is exactly the kind of local policy moment that quietly reshapes where billion-dollar infrastructure investments land.

Understanding Data Center Zoning Ordinances

Zoning ordinances are the municipal rulebook for land use — they determine what can be built where, under what conditions, and with what restrictions. For most of the 20th century, they covered the usual categories: residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural. Data centers didn't need their own category because they barely existed.

Now they do. A modern hyperscale data center can consume 100 megawatts or more of electricity, generate significant noise from cooling systems, require enormous water supplies for thermal management, and demand utility infrastructure that can strain local grids. A standard industrial zoning designation was never designed to accommodate a facility that draws more power than some mid-sized cities. Treating data centers like warehouses — which many municipalities still do — creates real problems for land use planning.

Purpose-built data center zoning ordinances typically address setback requirements, noise limits, power and water infrastructure thresholds, and visual screening. They can also establish conditional use permits that give municipalities leverage to negotiate community benefits before shovels hit the ground. Done well, they create a clear path for responsible infrastructure development while protecting neighboring land uses. Done poorly, they become either rubber stamps or de facto bans.

What's Happening in Conewago Township

Conewago Township's planning commission is in the process of crafting an ordinance specifically designed to govern data center development — a proactive move that reflects growing awareness among local governments that these projects require dedicated regulatory frameworks.

The October 27 meeting was a public hearing, and the 100-plus attendees signal that this is not a bureaucratic exercise happening in a vacuum. Residents are paying attention. So are developers, who have been eyeing mid-Atlantic and Pennsylvania markets aggressively as land costs and power availability in Northern Virginia — historically the epicenter of U.S. data center development — have pushed projects outward.

Pennsylvania's combination of relatively affordable land, proximity to major East Coast population centers, and available transmission infrastructure makes it a logical next frontier for data center growth. Conewago Township sits in Adams County, a largely agricultural area that is now facing the same land use tensions playing out in counties across Virginia, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest — communities that never expected to become nodes in the global internet infrastructure.

The planning commission's work here is consequential precisely because it's early. An ordinance drafted now, before the development pressure becomes overwhelming, has a real chance of being thoughtful. Ordinances drafted reactively, after a controversial project breaks ground, tend to be blunt instruments.

Implications for Data Center Growth and Project Feasibility

For infrastructure developers, zoning clarity is genuinely valuable — even when the rules are restrictive. The alternative is worse. Ambiguous zoning creates project risk, delays permitting timelines, and opens the door to legal challenges that can kill a project years into development. Developers will generally accept tighter rules if those rules are predictable and consistently applied.

What they resist — and what can meaningfully chill data center investment in a region — is a moving target. If Conewago's ordinance creates reasonable, clearly defined standards for setbacks, noise, utility capacity, and site design, it could actually attract quality projects by reducing regulatory uncertainty. If it imposes standards that are technically impossible to meet or that effectively zone data centers out of the township entirely, developers will simply move to the next municipality on their acquisition list.

The broader implication for data center growth in Pennsylvania is whether Conewago's approach becomes a template. Other townships are watching. If this ordinance is seen as workable by both industry and residents, it could accelerate responsible data center land use planning across the region. If it becomes a flashpoint — legally challenged, repeatedly revised, or perceived as community overreach — it will slow things down for everyone.

From a market perspective, the timing matters. Demand for data center capacity is being driven by AI infrastructure buildouts that are happening faster than the permitting and grid interconnection processes that enable them. Every jurisdiction that gets its regulatory framework right becomes more competitive for that investment.

Local Stakeholder Reactions

The 100-person turnout at October's meeting wasn't an industry crowd. Residents and landowners came to express concerns that are legitimate and worth taking seriously: noise pollution from constant cooling operations, truck traffic during construction, visual impact on rural landscapes, strain on local roads and utilities, and the question of whether a data center actually benefits the community that hosts it.

That last concern is the sharpest one. Data centers are capital-intensive but not labor-intensive. A 200-megawatt campus might create hundreds of construction jobs over 18 months and then operate with a permanent staff of 30 to 50 people. Compare that employment footprint to a manufacturing facility of similar land use, and the math isn't always flattering. The economic case for hosting a data center depends heavily on what the municipality negotiates upfront — tax agreements, infrastructure contributions, local hiring commitments — not on the facility's mere presence.

Landowners have a more complicated calculus. Agricultural land in Adams County sells for a fraction of what data center developers will pay. For a farmer looking at succession planning or carrying costs that no longer pencil out, a data center acquisition offer can be life-changing. But the sale of farmland to industrial use is permanent. Those acres don't come back. That's the tension at the heart of these community conversations.

Preparing for Future Infrastructure Needs

For developers and municipalities alike, the lesson from places that have gotten data center siting right is consistent: engage early, be specific, and build flexibility into the framework.

For municipalities like Conewago Township, that means crafting an ordinance that sets clear performance standards rather than prescriptive design requirements. Regulating outcomes — noise levels measured at the property line, water consumption limits, grid interconnection protocols — gives developers room to engineer solutions while protecting community interests. It also makes the ordinance more durable as technology evolves; cooling systems that are standard today may be obsolete in a decade.

For developers eyeing this market, the strategic move is to treat the planning process as an asset rather than an obstacle. Companies that show up at pre-application meetings, engage with planning commissioners before a formal submission, and present genuine community benefit packages tend to move through permitting faster than those that treat local government as a box to check. The 100-person turnout in Conewago is a signal worth reading — communities that feel blindsided by development become hostile to it.

The ordinance Conewago Township ultimately adopts will be one data point in a much larger pattern playing out across the country. Data center infrastructure is not going to stop expanding — the demand drivers are too powerful and too durable. But the question of where that infrastructure lands, under what conditions, and with what community input is being answered right now, municipality by municipality, ordinance by ordinance.

Developers and landowners who understand that the regulatory environment is being actively written — and who engage with that process constructively — are the ones who will still be building five years from now when the municipalities that got this wrong are untangling the mess.

[INTERNAL LINK: zoning ordinances]

[INTERNAL LINK: data center growth]

[INTERNAL LINK: community engagement]

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