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The Jackson Mansion in Berwick has stood since 1858, a brick landmark from the era when this stretch of the Susquehanna ran on coal and rail freight. On June 9, 2025, it hosted a different kind of announcement. Governor Josh Shapiro stood on its lawn and told Pennsylvania that Amazon was committing twenty billion dollars to two sites in the state — what his office would call the largest private-sector investment in Pennsylvania history.
Republican Senator David McCormick stood beside him. In a state that rarely gives its governor and its junior senator a shared microphone, the two men agreed on this: it was a win. McCormick called it a huge victory for Pennsylvania. Shapiro's own language was simpler and more declarative — Pennsylvania, he said, is competing again.
What Was Actually Being Announced
The twenty billion dollars was really two projects. The larger sits on roughly twelve hundred acres in Salem Township, Luzerne County, land Amazon bought from Talen Energy that spring. The site was chosen for a specific reason that had nothing to do with Berwick's ceremony: it sits beside the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, one of the largest nuclear plants in the country. A data center campus needs power before it needs almost anything else, and Amazon had solved that problem before it solved zoning, before it solved water, before the public had heard the word.
The second site, in Falls Township, Bucks County, is a former U.S. Steel property being redeveloped as the Keystone Trade Center. Between the two, the administration's figures promised 1,250 permanent jobs, alongside a larger number of construction positions during buildout.
Those numbers did not travel intact from the podium to the parcel. Coverage of the Salem Township approval specifically put that site's own job count at 600 — less than half the statewide figure being quoted the same week, at the site carrying most of the investment. Nobody at the announcement corrected the discrepancy, because nobody at the announcement was asked to reconcile a statewide talking point against a single township's own math.
The Mechanism Behind the Applause
Shapiro credited a specific piece of machinery for making the deal possible: Pennsylvania's new fast-track permitting system, introduced the year before to compress the state's review timeline for major projects. He described the process as transparent and open, the kind of language a governor uses when a system is working exactly as advertised.
What the fast-track description left out is timing. Salem Township's Board of Supervisors had already rezoned roughly sixteen hundred acres into a Special Data Center Overlay District more than a year earlier, in a 3–0 vote in May 2024 — well before Amazon's name was attached to the project in public, and well before the governor stood in Berwick to call it a win. The zoning, the tax framework, and the site itself were largely settled before the ceremony that announced them. The courtship the public saw was the closing scene of a deal that had already been arranged.
What Was Already on the Record
The day-one coverage of the announcement was not uncritical. Buried under the topline figures, reporters noted that the Salem Township campus alone was projected to draw as much electricity as roughly 900,000 homes, and to consume millions of gallons of water a day for cooling. A subhead in one outlet's coverage flagged, in passing, that concerns remained about how the new AI infrastructure would actually be powered.
That is the detail worth sitting with. The power and water questions this series spends its next several posts on were not discovered later, by investigative reporters working against the administration's silence. They were present in the room on June 9, 2025, printed in the same articles that carried the celebratory quotes, and treated as a footnote to a jobs number instead of a question that needed an answer before the ribbon was cut.
What follows in this series traces what happened to that footnote — in the townships living beside the campuses, in the water tables underneath them, in the tax rolls built to fund them, and in the paper trail the state itself tried, at different points, to keep private.
Sources: Pennsylvania Governor's Office, June 9, 2025 announcement; WHYY; PhillyVoice; Data Center Dynamics; Citizens' Voice/Republican Herald coverage of the May 2024 Salem Township zoning hearing.
