Mahoning Township Data Center, Mahoning Township, Pennsylvania

Stonebridge Associates' plan for a 16-building data center campus at the former Powder Mill Works near New Castle, in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, lost two zoning appeals in September 2026. The Mahoning Township Zoning Hearing Board voted 2 to 0 on September 15 to reject the appeal from Stonebridge, of Bethesda, Maryland, and its affiliate S.S. Penn LLC, days after the North Beaver Township board unanimously denied its appeal there. The site is 569 acres at 3478 Howard Drive and McClelland Road, next to and surrounding the Hickory Run Energy power plant; about 85 percent of the land is in North Beaver, and half of the 16 buildings would be in Mahoning.

The land once held an American Cyanamid plant that made explosives, including dynamite, until 1972. Stonebridge says it would spend more than $15 billion over up to six years, with power from Penn Power, and has not disclosed the campus's computing capacity. "We don't have a customer yet. But it's Meta, it's Oracle, it's Amazon, AWS," Stonebridge's Doug Firstenberg told about 150 people at a meeting in New Castle in July, promising 3,000 construction jobs, 400 permanent ones, water bought from Aqua rather than drawn from wells, and noise of 55 decibels at the property line.

Residents were not persuaded. "It's a significant health risk to our children. It sucks up resources," said Torry Argiro of Mahoning Township, who handed Firstenberg a lawsuit demanding evidence and design plans. "There's no research that's backed anything he said, and everything that we've researched says the opposite," said Jessica Main of North Beaver Township. "So we don't want this in our community."

The legal fight turns on timing. Mahoning's zoning office rejected Stonebridge's June 2 and June 9 applications as incomplete, over a wrong fee check and a missing $3,000 escrow deposit, and accepted one only on June 15, after the supervisors had tightened their April data center ordinance to make data centers a conditional use. Stonebridge argues it should be held to the original rules, while township solicitor Lou Perrotta says that once a proposed ordinance has been reviewed by a planning commission and properly advertised, developers must follow it, a principle known as the pending-ordinance doctrine.

The company has 30 days to take the Mahoning decision to the Lawrence County Court of Common Pleas, and Perrotta indicated it plans to. It has also appealed to the state Commonwealth Court after Common Pleas Judge Bradley G. Olson Jr. dismissed its lawsuit against the townships in July.