Nesquehoning residents were able to get their first glimpse on a proposed high performance computing/AI data center that Bitfarms Ltd. is hoping to construct on the western side of the borough.

The company held four public meetings early this week to go over details about the project, which includes the construction of four 315,000-square-foot buildings on approximately 90 acres of land off Industrial Road; as well as answer any questions and address concerns residents had over how the operations would be.

Prior to those meetings, the Times News sat down with Liam Wilson, chief operating officer for Bitfarms, and Alex Brammer, senior vice president of global data center operations, who outlined what the company hopes to bring to the community within the next three years.

“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible with the local community,” Wilson said. “We want to let you look and see kind of what’s under the hood of what’s been happening and what our plans are.”

“We really view this (project) as a partnership with the location community,” Wilson added, “and partnerships are a two-way street ... You need to take feedback and give feedback so any feedback that you give today will certainly be taken with us.”

While the company, which owns Panther Creek Power Plant off Dennison Road, is proposing development on land next to the power plant, representatives stressed that this is a separate project and is not being fueled by the waste coal burning operations.

“Although they sit very close to each other with regards to location, they’re actually completely different projects,” Wilson said. “The data center has nothing to do with the power plant and vice versa, the power plant has nothing to do with the data center.”

Why Nesquehoning?

Bitfarms is a Canadian-based company who has expanded into the U.S. market in recent years, with offices in Pittsburgh and New York City, employing approximately 350 people at 12 operating sites, including three in Pennsylvania.

In March, the company acquired Stronghold Digital Mining, which had owned the Panther Creek facility and utilized it as a cryptocurrency mining operation. Since then, the company has began working on shifting its focus away from bitcoin mining to data center creation.

“Our core values are respect, accountability, integrity and safety,” Wilson said. “We respect the communities that we operate in. We’re held accountable for our actions in those communities. We act with integrity and safety is absolutely front of mind with everything we do.”

Brammer said data centers have been in operation for over 30 years, but have become a hot topic of discussion in the last few years because of higher technology demands and the further development of artificial intelligence.

“When you think about a data center, it is a secure, high performance facility that houses hundreds or thousands of computers,” Brammer said. “They run our digital life ... your phone, your computer, the music that you listen to or having photos processed. Video streaming, banking services, they’re all services that are housed and facilitated by what is inside data centers.

“If you use ChatGPT, every query that you use is going through a data center somewhere. They provide connectivity, data storage. ... When you hear the Cloud, the cloud lives in these data centers. They are your digital life because they are so integral to day-to-day work that we do.”

So why is Nesquehoning a site that would make a good location for one of these centers?

Brammer and Wilson said the site works because it is a central location to the Tristate area, as well as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and beyond.

“Proper connectivity is something that is really important for data centers,” Brammer said, noting that they need what is called a “fiber backbone,” which is essentially an interstate system for the Internet.

“This area in Pennsylvania has a lot of fiber infrastructure that allows us to connect and provide all the services you know in this region,” he said.

Of the land, “It speaks for itself,” he said. “It is located in an area of the community that is not right up against housing.”

The proposed area is currently undeveloped, wooded land in the western side of an already established industrial park area, with a forested buffer zone between site and Route 54.

Representatives stressed that while some projects want to build close to homes, this property provides a 1,000-foot buffer zone between any residential structure.

“This is a really unique area because, while it is in your community, it is not across the street from grandma and grandpa’s house,” Brammer said. “It’s actually fairly remote and that was important for us as we were thinking about where to put this. ... It’s not lost on us how much we are actually going to rely on the community for this thing to work.”

Jobs and growth

The group addressed a common misconception that data centers do not need a lot of people to operate; however, that is not the case.

Brammer said that they hope to hire locally to not only construct the data center, but also to operate the facility once it is operational.

Overall, they are estimating approximately 400 employees for the construction, with over 300 employees running the facility once open.

“We need a community that is full of hardworking, skilled people and that is this community,” Brammer said. “We are literally going to rely on this community for this to work because we’re not going to be pulling folks from New York and San Francisco to do this. It’s going to be built and run locally.”

Types of jobs will include several trades, including electricians, plumbers, HVAC experts, welders, pipe fitters and more; as well as IT, security, maintenance people, managers, engineers and other types of jobs in the long-term.

The jobs that would include operations of the facility are family-sustaining jobs, with wages and benefit packages totaling near $140,000.

“We really think that there’s a great opportunity to help and re-skill this community, going from a kind of steel and coal to this new kind of industrial revolution that’s happening right now. ... We think that this is a way of bringing the benefits of this new era into this local community and having a really, truly meaningful impact on folks’ lives, folks’ economic lives, their job opportunities and that’s something we’re really proud of and we’re really excited about.”

The company plans to work with economic development groups to hold information sessions and job fairs, as well as Lehigh Carbon Community College and trade schools to further develop programs that will prepare people for this work environment.

To accomplish this, Wilson said that Bitfarms commissioned a study to look at the economic impact this project would have and it identified four types of employment that would benefit — direct construction, indirect construction (companies benefiting from the construction workers who are hired to build the centers), direct operational and indirect operational jobs (companies benefiting from data center employees spending at their places of business).

“We want to invest in the local area,” he said. “ We want these jobs to stay here. We want people’s kids and grandkids to be able to work in this facility.”

The environment and resident impacts

Several data center projects have been proposed around the Carbon County area and surrounding communities, many with significant developed footprints and extreme daily water consumption.

Bitfarms outlined its plan, which aims to create as little environmental disturbance and residential impacts as possible, while creating the most economic impacts to the region.

The company has pledged planting two trees for every one tree cut down on the property; and will have forested buffer zones, which act both as sound barriers, as well as for aesthetics.

They also are investing in a closed loop cooling system, rather than an evaporative cooling system, which is typically the norm for these data centers.

Brammer said that Bitfarms’ decision, while more expensive, will have a significantly less of an impact on the town’s water supply.

He said other data centers use upward of 3.5 million gallons of water daily to cool the centers and keep them operating; theirs would use approximately 3,000 gallons a day. This equates to the water consumption of 10 households a day.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” he said.

Data centers produce a lot of heat, which must be removed so that the computers can continue to operate properly. In Bitfarms’ design, the closed loop cooling system, which also comes with a larger price tag, has benefits to the overall reliability and sustainability to the system because it utilizes a combination of water an engineered cooling fluid and dry chillers to remove the heat, save on water loss and continuously cool the system.

“There’s no evaporation here, it’s purely just air to air heat exchange,” Brammer said, adding that this is where there is substantial water consumption savings.

Another concern the group addressed was noise.

Traffic noise at 50 feet is about 70 decibels. To equate this, think about a truck traveling down Route 54 and passing homes.

In the data center plans, the expectation is to keep operational noise to roughly 43 decibels at 100 feet.

“To give you a sense of what 43 decibels at 100 feet sounds like, if you were to stand outside and you were listening to the frogs and whatever else chirping, that’s roughly 45 to 48 decibels,” Brammer said, adding that in addition, the company has already been monitoring the area regarding noise with six electronic monitors to see what the noise level currently is on that site.

“We want to understand what the ambient noise profile is there right now,” he said, pointing to one monitor that registers approximately 60 decibels on unpopulated land. “That’s leaves rustling, birds chirping, frogs croaking and whatever else so the point is that we are designing this to be less than what the ambient noise profile is right now.

“We’re taking an approach here to minimize the impact as much as humanly possible with this development. We want a partnership with the community. We’re going to be here for decades so we want to make sure that we’re not having an undue impact in any way.”

Bitfarms data center project at a glance

Proposed construction to begin: 2026

Construction timeline: 19-24 months

Fully operational: 2028

Approximate cost for phase 1: $350 million

Number of employees during construction: Approximately 400

Number of employees once operational: 356

Average salary with benefits package: $144,000

Acres to be developed: Approximately 90

Number of proposed buildings: 4

Size of each building: 315,000 square feet

Dimensions of each building: 76 feet tall. Each building is two stories with each floor being 32 feet tall. There is also a 12-foot parapet with an acoustic wall on the top of each building.

Daily water usage: Approximately 3,000 gallons

Noise in decibels: Approximately 43