Can Data Centers Thrive in Upper Merion Township?

Upper Merion Township may not dominate conversations about data center policy, but its actions could offer valuable insights for infrastructure developers—perhaps more than what's emerging from Ashburn or Phoenix right now.

The township's Board of Supervisors is grappling with a question that many municipalities across the country are quietly asking themselves: When a data center wants to move in, what does the community actually gain—and what does it sacrifice?

Upper Merion's Position in the Data Center Conversation

Montgomery County sits in a corridor that has attracted significant infrastructure investment. Its proximity to Philadelphia, access to fiber networks, and relative land availability make it attractive to developers seeking mid-Atlantic alternatives to saturated Northern Virginia markets. Data centers don't just land anywhere—they follow power availability, fiber density, tax incentives, and increasingly, permissive (or at least predictable) regulatory environments.

Upper Merion is learning that being attractive to developers and being prepared for them are two very different things.

Vice Chairperson Bill Jenaway and the Board of Supervisors have stepped into that gap, working to establish a regulatory framework before development pressure makes thoughtful policy impossible. That sequencing matters enormously. Communities that wait until a 200MW hyperscale campus is already proposed tend to find themselves negotiating from weakness—trading away long-term concerns for short-term approval timelines.

The township's approach—regulate first, then develop—flips that dynamic.

What the Board of Supervisors Is Actually Building

The specifics of Upper Merion's proposed regulations reflect the hard questions any serious zoning authority should be asking about data center development: Where can these facilities locate? What utility loads can the grid realistically absorb? What aesthetic and noise standards apply to facilities that run cooling systems 24 hours a day?

These aren't hypothetical concerns. A mid-sized data center—say, 20 to 50MW of critical IT load—draws roughly the same electrical demand as 15,000 to 40,000 homes. A hyperscale facility can dwarf that. When that load lands on a local distribution grid without adequate planning, the consequences ripple outward to existing ratepayers and infrastructure systems that were never designed for it.

The Board's effort to get ahead of these realities is exactly the kind of infrastructure policy that separates communities that shape their growth from those that simply absorb it.

From a developer's perspective, this cuts both ways. Clear, codified regulations can actually be a feature, not a bug. Investors and site selectors increasingly want regulatory certainty—ambiguity creates timeline risk, and timeline risk destroys pro formas. A township with a defined approval process and published standards is often easier to work with than one where every project negotiates from scratch.

What Communities Actually Win — and Worry About

The standard pitch for data center development hits familiar notes: tax revenue, construction jobs, local economic activity. Those benefits are real, if sometimes overstated. A hyperscale data center can generate substantial property tax revenue while employing only 30 to 50 permanent workers—a ratio that looks very different from a traditional commercial or industrial tenant.

That asymmetry matters for Upper Merion's calculus. Tax base diversification has genuine value. But if a facility draws significant infrastructure investment—road upgrades, utility reinforcement, emergency service planning—without generating proportional employment or community engagement, residents are right to scrutinize the trade.

The noise question is one that rarely gets enough attention early in the process. Data centers run diesel generators for backup power testing, operate large cooling towers, and generate constant mechanical noise from HVAC systems. For facilities sited near residential areas—even with substantial buffers—that's a livability issue that no tax benefit fully offsets.

Getting noise, setback, and screening standards right at the zoning stage is infinitely easier than retrofitting them after a facility is operational.

Upper Merion's review process gives the community leverage to address these concerns before shovels hit the ground. That's not anti-development—it's smart development.

What Upper Merion's Approach Signals for the Broader Market

The data center industry is at an inflection point in its relationship with host communities. For most of the past two decades, developers held most of the cards: they brought capital, they created construction activity, and local governments—eager for ratables—largely accommodated them. Utility incentives, tax abatements, and streamlined permitting were standard tools to attract projects.

That dynamic is shifting. Power constraints are tightening in major markets. Grid operators are scrutinizing large load interconnection requests more carefully. Communities that once competed aggressively for data center investment are beginning to ask harder questions about energy consumption, water use, and what happens to local infrastructure when a 100MW facility comes online.

Upper Merion's regulatory work is a local-scale example of a broader recalibration happening across the industry.

For developers eyeing the mid-Atlantic market, the lesson isn't that Upper Merion is closed for business. It's that community engagement and regulatory fluency are now table-stakes capabilities. The firms that will win projects in markets like this are the ones that can walk into a township meeting, speak credibly about grid impact and noise mitigation, and demonstrate that they've thought seriously about what it means to be a long-term neighbor—not just a tenant.

The developers who treat community regulation as an obstacle to route around will find fewer and fewer places willing to take their calls.

For other townships watching this process, Upper Merion offers a replicable template: establish standards proactively, require meaningful infrastructure impact analysis, and create a predictable approval pathway that protects community interests without making legitimate development impossible.

What Comes Next

The data center demand curve isn't going to flatten. AI workloads, cloud infrastructure expansion, and the general digitization of commerce and government mean that the need for large-scale compute infrastructure will continue growing for years. That demand has to land somewhere.

The real question isn't whether communities like Upper Merion will see data center proposals—they will. The question is whether they'll have the regulatory architecture in place to shape those projects when they arrive.

Jenaway and the Board of Supervisors are betting that getting the framework right now is worth the effort. Given the pace at which development pressure tends to accelerate once a region gets on a site selector's radar, that's probably the right bet.

For infrastructure investors and developers operating in the mid-Atlantic corridor, Upper Merion's process is worth tracking closely—not as a cautionary tale, but as a preview of what sophisticated municipal engagement with data center development looks like. The communities that figure this out will attract better projects. The developers who adapt to that reality will build more of them.

That's not a tension. That's an opportunity.

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