Archbald Data Center, Archbald Borough, Pennsylvania

Site work is underway at the former Highway Auto Parts junkyard on Eynon Jermyn Road in Archbald for Project Boson, a proposed 619,925-square-foot data center from PDC Realty LLC, a company affiliated with Kriger Construction, while Pennsylvania regulators have flagged deficiencies in its stormwater permit application. PDC Realty bought the 83.5-acre junkyard in Archbald Borough, Lackawanna County, for $1.575 million in August 2025 to build the data center, first filed as the Archbald Data & Energy Center.

The original April 2025 plan called for three two-story buildings under 70 feet tall, a 20,000-square-foot office and an equipment yard for substations, with 200-foot buffers from homes to the east and south; the three buildings have since been merged into one. Because the project applied before Archbald tightened its data center zoning in November 2025, it is grandfathered as a permitted use and skips the conditional-use hearings other campuses face, though it still needs final land development approval from the borough and permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP's August 26, 2026 letter on the stormwater permit listed deficiencies in 23 categories and about 140 comments, including soil contamination and a lack of investigation into possible groundwater contamination from a junkyard that operated for nearly 70 years. Across the road, Kriger Construction president Jim Marzolino applied in March 2026 through Essential Energy LLC for a natural gas power plant with four 66,000-square-foot turbine pads, less than 1,000 feet from Staback Park and about half a mile from Valley View Intermediate School; unlike the data center, it needs a conditional-use hearing before borough council. In August, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had visited Archbald, ordered data center developers statewide to meet his GRID standards through the DEP.

"These kids are never getting away from these," said Madonna Munley, a fifth-generation Archbald resident, of the children in nearby housing who would live, play and go to school beside the data centers and plant. Council President Louis Rapoch said, "We don't want it there, like we don't want the data centers there. These are speculators that are coming in here, hoping that we'll just lay down."

Archbald now has six data center campuses proposed, 51 buildings in all, most along a stretch of less than a mile of Eynon Jermyn Road and Business Route 6; in September 2026 Lackawanna County commissioners hired EmPower Analytics Group to study the combined air and health effects of the county's proposed data centers and power plants. What decides Project Boson now is the DEP's review of its stormwater permit and the borough's final land development approval.