Organizers with Philly Thrive and People’s Tech Project aren’t waiting for an artificial intelligence data center in the Bellwether District to be announced. In the deep freeze of February, the Point Breeze environmental justice advocacy group took to the sidewalks of Grays Ferry, knocking on 1,876 doors and speaking with nearly 500 people.
The advocates expect a developer to start building as quickly as possible to avoid community resistance. “They can’t wait to build the data center,” says Shawmar Pitts, Thrive’s managing co-director. “You need a lot of room, and you need water. The Schuylkill is right there. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what they are trying to do.”
Thrive got its start organizing against pollution from the PES refinery, at the time the city’s largest single source of air pollution. After an explosion and fire in 2019 shut down the plant, Hilco Redevelopment Partners (HRP), an Illinois-based company, bought the 1,300-acre site. HRP is developing it into a new industrial hub, branded the Bellwether District, planned to include distribution centers and manufacturing facilities. So far, Hilco has announced a DrinkPAK beverage bottling plant.
Thrive members aren’t the only people suspecting a data center at Bellwether. As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December, HRP representatives would neither confirm nor deny that they were speaking with data center developers. Grid asked a City representative about plans to build a data center and did not receive a response.
“I think we are purposely targeted,” says Thrive board president Sonya Sanders, speaking about the history of placing polluting facilities in Black and Brown communities. “They put them in our areas because they feel as though we can do nothing.”
Pitts says he expects the community to face higher electric bills and air pollution from diesel generators if a data center is built nearby. “From everything that we know about data centers, the community is going to have to foot the bill for the power,” he says.
DeMorra Hawkins, interim co-director of Philly Thrive, sees data centers in particular as a threat that could motivate rural and suburban communities to unite with urban environmental justice. “The data center is one of these things that have united us across all geographical and economical and racial barriers,” she says. “Nobody wants a data center.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has courted data center developers to build in the Keystone State to create jobs. “My husband is a union carpenter. I understand what those jobs mean for the strength of our economy,” Hawkins says. “But let’s be realistic. I looked up something, and on average, it takes anywhere between 50 to 100 people at most to run a data center. … You can’t pay 100 people enough of a salary to offset a whole community that’s going to be affected.”
AI boosters such as Elon Musk say that AI (run from data centers such as one that could be built in the Bellwether District) will unlock a future of abundance for humanity. Thrive and People’s Tech Project are not convinced that the transformation will benefit their communities. Instead they expect AI to facilitate policing and help the government violate civil liberties. “We’ll be a police state,” Hawkins says. “We won’t need a large police force when we can store everyone’s face for recognition in this data center.”
Devren Washington, organizing director for People’s Tech Project, says “part of what’s driving these data center buildouts” is “the need for more computational capacity to service these products that ultimately get sold to local governments around the country.”
The groups plan to continue educating the community and lobbying elected officials for legislation such as state Sen. Katie Muth’s proposal for a three-year pause on data center development, Hawkins says. “We can get ahead of this battle.”
