Residents in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, are pushing back against a sprawling Amazon Web Services data center campus rising near neighborhoods, schools, and the Delaware River.

At a Falls Township Board of Supervisors meeting last Monday, residents voiced alarm over a massive "digital infrastructure campus" under construction on the former U.S. Steel parcel now called the Keystone Trade Center, according to LevittownNow.com.

The development was approved in March 2025 and includes 10 buildings ranging from 112,000 to 217,000 square feet, totaling more than 2 million square feet.

The site was identified as a data center in August 2024, and Amazon's ties to it became public in June 2025 after the company spent months trying to keep its role quiet.

A petition opposing the project has already drawn over 2,000 signatures.

"I suddenly learned that our town officials have been exploring and constructing the creation of a data center just over six miles from my home in a neighborhood of hundreds of homes and approximately 12 schools," said Amanda Westerman, a mother of three, according to LevittownNow.com.

Data centers are increasingly central to cloud computing and AI, but they can also raise serious local concerns, especially when sited near homes, schools, and waterways. Residents at the meeting raised fears about noise, environmental disruption, and possible health impacts.

"AI data centers on smaller scales than the Falls Township data center cause horrendous amounts of temperature increases, wildlife disruption, even noise pollution, including subaudible infrasound that can vibrate through buildings," said Julia Resler, who has lived in the area for eight years.

For many residents, the frustration is also about the process, not just pollution.

Several said they did not receive mailed notices and argued that relying on print-only legal notices left many people out of the loop. For communities already worried about industrial development, that can deepen the feeling that major decisions are being made around them, not with them.

And because data centers can require large amounts of power and infrastructure, the debate in Falls Township reflects a broader national tension over who benefits from tech expansion and who bears the consequences.

For now, township leaders say there is little they can do to stop the project.

"It can't be stopped. It's not going to be stopped," Supervisor Chairperson Jeff Dence told residents.

Still, officials said they will try to create more direct public engagement.

Dence told the crowd the township plans to organize a town hall-style meeting and invite Amazon representatives to answer questions publicly.

Residents, meanwhile, are continuing to organize. Opponents said they plan to keep researching the effects of large data centers and gather more petition signatures.

A separate group also staged a protest in recent weeks, showing that community resistance is not fading as construction moves forward.

"If I was aware that this was a data center a year ago, I would have been here sooner," Westerman said.

Resler was even more direct: "We, the people of Falls Township, do not want this data center completed."

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