Meet the ‘mini Erin Brockoviches’ battling a data center’s eminent domain threat—and Amazon’s shadow

Receiving the money was contingent upon the residents of the rural Pennsylvania region at the foot of the Poconos allowing the developer to build a 15-building campus, dubbed Project Hazelnut. NorthPoint’s proposal to Hazle Township was a $165 million investment in the area, which beyond the payout for “eligible households” in the township’s 4,500-property township, also included funding for a local police department, according to the letter to residents viewed by Fortune.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report the $10,000 incentive, which would only be paid once the first building of the data center campus is complete, and which was largely rejected by the township’s residents.

In their efforts to combat Project Hazelnut, locals told Fortune they’ve discovered just how large these efforts extend, potentially to Amazon, whose name is conspicuously absent from all Hazelnut and NorthPoint branding. 

Local officials and NorthPoint refused to confirm if Amazon would be Hazelnut’s end-user, but locals began filing right-to-know requests and confirmed Amazon’s role in the project when records were released in January between Amazon and the Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development. 

The emails, viewed by Fortune and previously reported on by local outlets, showed that while state officials tried to disclose Amazon’s role in the project, Amazon wanted its involvement to be covert due to broad “contractual issues.” 

An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune the company is “evaluating multiple sites across the Commonwealth” and is in discussions with NorthPoint, but does not have a definitive agreement in place. In a blog post published on Friday, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has committed to no longer entering into nondisclosure agreements with government agencies related to data-center projects.

Beyond being frustrated with the secrecy, locals said they were baffled by the lack of specifics and clarity the stakeholders had about the project, per the records.

“We really had no idea what was happening,” Cook told Fortune, “and a hyperscaler data center of what they’re proposing—1,300 acres—is not a small project. We’ve been trying to get information, and unfortunately, the only way we’ve been able to get it is by right-to-know requests.”

NorthPoint did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Activated by eminent domain

Cook, an insurance agent living in Sugarloaf Township next door, has her own reasons to oppose the data center project. She owns one of the 28 properties facing eminent domain threats from local utility company PPL Electric Utilities for that very same data-center offering the five-figure check, Cook said. In 2024, the utilities company and a developer approached residents in Luzerne County, where Sugarloaf is located, handing out pamphlets asserting the right of eminent domain, or the government’s power to seize private property in the public’s interest. PPL Electric Utilities proposed an 11.2-mile high-voltage power line running through the homes that would supply electricity to the campus.

Hazle Township residents’ disdain for the $10,000 incentive is just the tip of the iceberg, Cook said. Impacted residents and neighbors formed the Alliance to Stop the Line and have filed about 20 formal protests with the Public Utilities Commission challenging PPL’s plans, arguing a high-voltage line would decimate property values, emit noise pollution, and generate electromagnetic fields associated with health risks, next to their homes.

Last month PUC administrative law judges temporarily halted proceedings for the powerline, determining it was too early to grant utility extensions while the data-center developments had yet to be approved and were still being contested in court. In the first three months of 2026, at least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion connectively were delayed or cancelled, and active opposition groups across 49 states grew from 396 from the end of last year to 833 by March, according to a Data Center Watch report published in June.

Hazle Township is familiar with grassroots protests over social and economic issues. Hazle Township completely encircles the City of Hazleton, which became the face of an anti-immigrant movement two decades ago, when then-Mayor Lou Barletta passed the controversial Illegal Immigration Relief Act, fining landlords who rented to undocumented immigrants and withholding permits from businesses employing those immigrants. Barletta capitalized on a period of deindustrialization and demographic changes to draw in working-class, white supporters. Barletta ran for Pennsylvania governor in 2022, losing in the Republican primary, while Hazleton continued to become a heavily Hispanic city afterward, scrambling commentators’ brains as many of those residents chose to vote Republican.

Residents of these northeastern Pennsylvania towns today see their campaign as a small but vital part of a national opposition to the AI infrastructure buildout associated with rising costs and widespread environmental risks. The widely cited statistic is that nearly 70% of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, according to surveys by both Gallup and NBC News. “The data-center rebellion, with its local origins and compounding grievances,” The Atlantic‘s George Packer recently noted, “is thoroughly American.”

According to local protester Annie Vinatieri, today’s data-center protests are a nonpartisan movement driven primarily by Americans with little experience with environmentalism, with demographics “mostly white working and middle/upper class.” She said a minority of Dominican Americans, “almost all of whom are immigrants,” have also shown interest.

Residents of these northeastern Pennsylvania towns today see their campaign as a small but vital part of a national opposition to the AI infrastructure buildout associated with rising costs and widespread environmental risks. 

“Many of us are pro se, mini Erin Brokoviches actually getting somewhere,” Cook said. “We’re having these small victories here and there, and it’s all adding up.”

Project Hazelnut’s detractors and supporters

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Project Hazelnut in November 2024 as the first test subject of an executive order signed the day before fast-tracking the permitting process for AI infrastructure. Months later, in July 2025, Shapiro announced Amazon would invest $20 billion in an AI buildout in Pennsylvania, the largest capital investment in the commonwealth’s history.

The investment plan will account for just a handful of the 4,767 data centers in the U.S., part of a ballooning AI boom expected to reach $7 trillion in spending by 2030.

At first, the announcements didn’t raise many eyebrows among area residents, according to Vinatieri, another Sugarloaf resident. These buildouts were not for data centers, but rather “innovation and technology campuses.”

“When you say technology campus, that’s very vague. It sounds very academic,” Vinatieri told Fortune. “When it became apparent, What was happening? People really got concerned and started to understand what it meant.”

Despite the data centers having yet to gain approval, hundreds of acres of land were cleared. Vinatieri spoke with neighbors who claimed they saw triple the deer and wildlife in their backyards as a result of habitat displacement. Residents like Cook were particularly concerned about the construction’s proximity to some of Pennsylvania’s Superfund sites, or pieces of U.S. land requiring long-term clean-up efforts as a result of hazardous waste pollution, as construction could damage toxic containment barriers.

But tensions increased in earnest when Amazon began snapping up land in neighboring areas, such as in July 2025, when Brewster Development Company sold about 350 acres of land in Kline Township, Pennsylvania to Amazon Data Services for about $180 million. 

Victories for data center opposition

The released records from the right-to-know requests fueled public dissent for the data center and scrutiny over the campus’s potential use of natural resources. In May, a Luzerne County judge denied an appeal for the Project Hazelnut data center on the grounds that the project did not have required zoning approval, in part because data centers were not included in the local zoning ordinance, and because the initial approval process did not have adequate opportunities for public input. NorthPoint still has options for gaining approval.

Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket—Getty Images

Shapiro has also since walked back some of his support for data center construction. In August, he signed an executive order eliminating fast-track permitting and requiring local, rather than state-level Department of Environmental Protection for prospective data center projects. He recently cited similar concerns as those in Hazle and surrounding townships: that companies were withholding information from the public in part because they didn’t have the answers to key questions yet.

“What I was finding after listening to the neighbors about their concerns, and then talking with some of these developers, is those developers who were wreaking havoc on the communities, they actually didn’t have any access to power,” Shapiro told CBS News Philadelphia last week. “They actually didn’t have a technology company that wanted to, you know, use their development, and so they were kind of speculating. And in the process of speculating, they were wreaking havoc on the community.”

Cook would like to see her and her neighbors win over the PPL’s eminent domain case and would consider it a victory for NorthPoint to abandon Project Hazelnut. But even then, she has concerns. NorthPoint is exploring data center development in other parts of the state, including a 1,400 acre development in Banks Township.

“My fear is that they’re just going to go somewhere else, right?” she said.