Inside Josh Shapiro’s Attempt to Navigate the Data Center Backlash

On March 6, Pennsylvania real estate mogul Brian O’Neill shot a panicked email to Benjamin Kirshner, a top state official, with a plea to the governor.

Amazon, wrote the property developer, had just told him “in writing, and I have sent you the e-mail, that they will not be doing any projects in Pennsylvania until they get certainty that the projects they have invested in can move forward. In conversations, they have pointed out to us that they have been appealed in EVERY project at EVERY turn,” O’Neill told Kirshner, Governor Josh Shapiro’s chief transformation and opportunity officer, referring to local governments rejecting the company’s permit applications. His own project in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken had been blocked in November.

O’Neill then pleaded for the governor to “make sure we are not going to get appealed frivolously by people who just want to slow us down for sport like Amazon,” asking the governor to force those who challenge zoning decisions to post a bond double the value of the project. “If a $2 billion development is postponed due to an appeal, they should have to post a bond for $4 billion,” he wrote.

Kirshner forwarded the request to top officials in the Shapiro administration with a “FYI.”

What if anything came out of this correspondence we don’t know. The Shapiro administration told me it did not respond to O’Neill’s email. When asked if it supported his idea, the governor’s office declined to say, simply stating that the idea would require legislation, which has not been introduced. A representative for O’Neill told me they would supply a response but did not follow up. When asked about the email, Amazon gave me a statement from an unnamed spokesperson stating the company “has a deep and ongoing commitment to Pennsylvania.”

The whole exchange exemplifies the mess Shapiro — or any governor and future presidential hopeful — finds themselves in as an AI data center boom they welcomed runs headlong into a bitter backlash.

Shapiro is not the only state executive being forced to respond to the loud and opposing interests of real estate developers and voters concerned about the rapid pace and lack of transparency of the AI buildout. In Maine, Governor Janet Mills last week vetoed a statewide data center ban, much to the chagrin of the Democratic voter base she’ll need to win a U.S. Senate primary against insurgent progressive upstart Graham Platner.

On the one hand, there’s a lot for a governor to love in the explosion of data center development. The AI revolution has helped Pennsylvania’s economy grow during an overall difficult moment for the U.S. economy. Having announced last June that he was going “all in on AI,” Shapiro has coaxed billions of dollars in Big Tech investment to his state. Reports pin the planned data center investment in Pennsylvania at $100 billion total. Roughly a fifth of that total is from Amazon, which in 2025 announced that it would build more than $20 billion in AI infrastructure in the Commonwealth.

On the other hand, Pennsylvania — a key battleground for anyone seeking the White House — has become a bellwether for the country’s fears about data centers. Many in the state are worried the developments could disrupt the energy grid and raise electricity bills. Depending on how they’re designed, these projects can either be boring box-shaped structures running computers and generating tax revenue or noisy polluters draining local aquifers.

Since late 2024, 26 data center projects have attracted at least some degree of public opposition in Pennsylvania, according to the Heatmap Pro database, which shows the frustrations are widespread across regions, political affiliations, and socioeconomic classes. Most local complaints have focused water consumption, noise, energy consumption, and pollution. My own reporting has also found secrecy to be a major complaint; real estate developers are in many cases getting approval to build data center campuses without telling the public who may inherit these facilities after they’re completed.

Emails obtained by Heatmap News from a grassroots organizer in rural Pennsylvania provide a glimpse into how Shapiro has navigated the intensifying drumbeat against data centers. These records — more than 150 pages of correspondence between Shapiro’s office, Amazon, and others in the tech and real estate industries — paint a vivid picture of how the rumored 2028 Democratic presidential contender initially sought to woo Amazon, then sought to balance that pro-business approach with rising angst against AI and data centers.

For example, in April 2025, months before Amazon announced its $20 billion investment, Shapiro’s office offered the tech giant “exclusive early access” to a permitting fast track program not yet available to the public. Kirshner described the provision to Amazon as an “enhanced permit coordination framework established specifically for Amazon Web Services (AWS) development projects within Pennsylvania.” According to a memo included in the emails bearing the governor’s insignia, the state would help AWS “be among the first companies” to utilize a new program that lets third-party contractors complete parts of the permit application review process.

This program — known as SPEED, or Streamlining Permits for Economic Expansion and Development — was created through state law in July 2024. Under the program, companies seeking specific environmental permits are granted permission to use approved outside hires to review applications and then give those recommendations to the state for use in decisions on permits. The goal of this is to expedite permit reviews overall.

Even though the program was created in 2024, it takes time to stand up a new government program like this. Members of the public were given formal access to apply for the SPEED program at the end of June 2025. This was months after the “exclusive” offer was sent to Amazon.

Notably, the memo is labeled “subject to a non-disclosure agreement dated effective as of Feb. 15, 2024.” The use of NDAs between governments and data center developers is controversial because the agreements swear public officials to secrecy, making them answerable not to the public but rather to private entities within the scope of the contract. In Minnesota, lawmakers have explicitly tried to shed light on data center development by banning local political leaders from entering into NDAs. So controversial is this practice that Microsoft issued a public pledge to stop using NDAs with local governments.

Rosie Lapowsky, Shapiro’s press secretary, confirmed in a statement to me that the administration had given Amazon advance notice of the SPEED program and offered to help it navigate the permitting process, but said that AWS has not so far used the program for any projects.

As for the NDA, it’s not clear what the terms of the agreement referenced in the offer were, who in the office signed it, and whether Shapiro himself was bound by it. This is not the first time NDAs have come up within the Shapiro administration, however. Spotlight PA, an investigative news outlet, reported in 2023 that members of his transition team signed NDAs.

Amazon declined to say whether it had asked anyone in the Shapiro administration to sign a NDA. Shapiro’s office would not provide additional information on whether the governor, any top state officials — including Kirshner, the main signatory of the memo — or any of the governor’s staff are under a NDA with Amazon.

‘We absolutely did not confirm’

I obtained this window into the Shapiro administration from Colby Wesner, vice president of the grassroots organization Concerned Citizens of Montour County in Pennsylvania. By day, Wesner works in pediatric medicine, but he’s become a well-known figure in tech-anxious corners of Facebook for posting simple videos in which he details the findings of public records requests he submits to attempt to understand Amazon’s data center development practices in the Keystone State.

He first became involved in the fight against data centers, he told me, when developer Talen Energy asked Montour County to rezone hundreds of acres for industrial use. As I chronicled in February, Wesner and others suspected it was for an Amazon data center, but local officials wouldn’t say. Activists grew especially frustrated with this silence after discovering that county staff and at least one county commissioner had signed NDAs against discussing data center development. Wesner wound up discovering that one project was indeed for Amazon, and his video unveiling his findings sparked a local outcry.

“The more you learn, the more you crave to get more information to figure out how secretive these projects generally are, and how non-transparent the state government is,” Wesner told me. “Me personally, I feel obligated to keep doing this because it started from our small county, but Pennsylvania counties across the state are reeling from this.”

To be clear, there are some data center projects in Pennsylvania that Amazon has gotten behind publicly as it sought to develop them, such as this one in Salem Township and this one in Falls Township. Shapiro mentioned both projects in his June 2025 speech announcing Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment in the state, which he said was the single largest capital investment in the Commonwealth’s history.

“Our administration is actively engaged with Amazon on additional sites in our Commonwealth, helping them to secure local support, developing the infrastructure needed to support more data centers and ensure our permitting process works quickly,” Shapiro said at the time, crediting these investments to faster permits that “give confidence to companies like Amazon that their projects will get built on time.”

The emails from Wesner show that Amazon was involved in another project in the state it has not yet confirmed to date: Project Hazelnut in Hazle Township, which is currently under development by real estate firm NorthPoint.

According to tech trade publication Data Center Dynamics, the first public reference to Project Hazelnut was actually from Shapiro, who embraced the project site as a preferred location for tech development and faster permitting. In November 2024, he hosted an event there to publicize a new executive order establishing a statewide “permit fast track” program and identified Project Hazelnut as one of the first to benefit. In a press release, his office said the project was a “transformative technology campus” that “exemplifies Governor Shapiro’s commitment to growing Pennsylvania’s economy all across the Commonwealth by improving permitting processes, reducing delays, and increasing our competitiveness by ensuring government operates at the speed of business.”

It was apparently only afterward, in January 2025, that residents in the surrounding Hazle township learned what Project Hazelnut was: a roughly 1,300-acre campus that would purportedly include 15 data center buildings.

Over the months that followed, getting Hazelnut built was clearly on the Shapiro administration’s minds, as its permitting status was listed alongside the Salem and Falls township projects in the “exclusive” permitting benefit the governor’s office offered the tech giant in April 2025. The memo states that NorthPoint, not Amazon, is “the developer,” but also says Amazon would work on submitting air and storage tank permitting information. Elsewhere in the memo it states that Amazon’s public association as developer of the Salem project led to “multiple challenges” in the permitting process.

Over the summer, Ethan Dodd, a reporter for Real Clear Politics’ Pennsylvania blog, reached out to Amazon asking questions about Project Hazelnut and other data centers in Pennsylvania. “Governor Shapiro’s office thought you would be best to answer these.”

This email immediately led to worries at Amazon. “It appears from the inquiry and the fact that the Gov’s office has directed the reporter to Amazon for more details they may have outed us on a project,” wrote Preston Grisham, who was then a D.C.-based policy lead at Amazon, to Becky Ford, an executive on Amazon’s economic development team.

Ford then forwarded these concerns to Shapiro’s office. “Please see the inquiry below,” Ford wrote to Kirshner and Rick Siger, head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development. She asked to know who told the reporter to contact Amazon and said Hazelnut was not a site they had “disclosed.”

“In talking to the team we absolutely did not confirm or discuss anything about AWS and Hazelnut,” Siger replied, accusing local residents of “speculating about AWS at Hazelnut — though we did not comment/confirm.”

Kirshner followed up, accusing the reporter of “attempting to create a narrative” and adding: “We did absolutely not tell this reporter that Northpoint was AWS.”

Months later, locals succeeded in pressuring Hazle to reject Project Hazelnut. NorthPoint has appealed the denial in court, as state environmental regulators under Shapiro have continued to advance the project’s environmental permit applications. NorthPoint did not respond to requests for comment. Amazon did not comment on whether it is involved with Project Hazelnut.

Hazelnut’s continued progress is happening as at least one data center project benefiting from the state’s fast-track permitting programs has stalled out. Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that the permitting application for Project Gravity, another large would-be tech hub, had been put on hold pending additional information from the developer. As in the case of Hazelnut, locals in the tiny township of Archbald learned that Gravity would be a sprawling data center campus, one of a multitude of data center proposals in the area causing chaos between residents and local leadership.

Lapowsky stressed in the statement to me that state agencies in charge of permitting handle applications based on existing law, which includes opportunities for public input and appeal.

‘Strict standards’

Amidst this anger, Shapiro has started to work rhetoric into his public comments saying he feels the pain of places like Hazle. In his February State of the State address, he laid out what he called “the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development” principles, or GRID. He said that these standards, developed by his administration “in consultation with the community,” would “hold data centers accountable to strict standards if they want our full support.”

Three of the four standards struck me as standard fare. Developers would need to bring their own power or pay for new generation; companies would need to hire and train local workers; and they would need to commit to high environmental protection standards. One, though, stood out to me: Shapiro would make developers “commit to strict transparency standards.”

“Too many of these projects have been shrouded in secrecy, with local communities left in the dark about who is coming in and what they’re building,” he said. “That needs to change.”

The same day Shapiro gave that speech, Siger wrote Amazon to assure them the principles “are intended to be voluntary and Shapiro is “not proposing to ban or even discourage data centers or other large loads that don’t agree to implement them from siting here.”

Shapiro’s team also wanted to make sure Amazon got an advance look at the official “principles” before they were made formal and effective. On March 18, Shapiro’s deputy chief of staff Samuel Robinson wrote Ford and Merle Madrid, an Amazon lobbyist, with a “feedback draft of the principles” ahead of plans to “finalize and make the Principles public shortly.”

Amazon may have seen these principles, but I haven’t, and neither have most Pennsylvanians. More than two months since the State of the State address, Shapiro’s office has yet to release a formal outline of the governor’s data center development principles. The “feedback draft” itself wasn’t included in the cache of emails, nor was Amazon’s response, nor is it clear whether any other large tech companies may have received an advance consultation copy.

In the statement provided by the governor’s office, Lapowsky told me that the Shapiro administration is working to finalize and implement these standards and will release more details in the coming weeks, pointing to the GRID principles as outlined in the governor’s speech.

“These standards make clear that if companies want the Commonwealth’s full support — including access to tax credits and faster permitting — they must meet strict expectations around transparency, environmental protection, and community impact,” Lapowsky said. “This is about setting a higher bar for projects, not lowering it, and ensuring development happens responsibly and in a way that benefits Pennsylvanians.”

What we do know is that Shapiro last year was generally sympathetic to hearing Amazon’s needs, too. In the only message from the governor himself that appears in the emails — an August 2025 note sent to Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, after the two saw each other in Pittsburgh — Shapiro writes, “We are thankful and excited about AWS’ historic investment and I agree that our teams continue to work very well together and we continue to be committed to your success in PA. We also look forward to the Fall announcement of the additional sites in PA, and would love to collaborate and maximize the impact of those announcements and share the story of positive economic and community outcomes together.”

He concluded the email: “My door is always open should you have issues or ideas you wish to discuss. Please keep in touch.”