Shapiro slaps local-veto rules on PA data centers
A 2028 hopeful who spent last year courting Amazon-backed campuses just told AI builders they do not get to skip the township meeting.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order Tuesday that puts local officials in front of every data center project, yanks those projects out of the state's fast-track permitting program, and bans the nondisclosure agreements developers have used to keep plans quiet. The order also forces operators to sign a legally binding commitment to rules Shapiro floated in February: they pay for their own power, hire locally, deal transparently with local governments, and meet high water-conservation standards. In remarks that would have been unthinkable from this governor a year ago, he said Pennsylvanians "will not be bullied by these developers" or "bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies."
That is a reversal, not a tweak. Shapiro had touted Amazon-backed developments and, earlier this year, still framed Pennsylvania as needing "to play a leading role" in the AI race with China. Then the speculative pipeline arrived. He said about five projects have actually received permits, while roughly 100 proposals are "wreaking havoc" on communities and will never be built. He called out a Montgomery County plan in the county where he lives — "I'm a hell no on that project" — and said the split legislature's failure to pass new rules left him no choice but to move by executive order. He is also on the ballot this fall. Last week the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that his early embrace of the campuses was already testing his approval ratings.
We mapped the national backlash earlier this month — US data center bans top 500 as New York, Texas push back — after New York's Kathy Hochul signed a moratorium and Texas's Greg Abbott paused a slice of projects. Shapiro is not copying either move. He is not declaring a freeze. He is making local consent, self-funded power, and no-NDA sunlight the price of entry, and he is doing it in a swing state that until Tuesday was still selling itself as open for AI infrastructure. A poll we covered in July found 61% of Americans now oppose local data centers. The industry's answer, via the Data Center Coalition, is that opposition moved as fast as the build-out and that the facts on jobs and taxes have not caught up. Maybe. The more useful tell is that a governor who wanted the campuses is now running against the speculators. If that is the new equilibrium in Harrisburg, the constraint on the next gigawatt is no longer a transformer lead time. It is a township supervisor.
What to watch: whether "local yes" becomes a template other governors copy, or whether the hundred zombie proposals simply refile under a friendlier county.
Modular open-sourced the Mojo compiler and toolchain today under Apache 2.0 with LLVM exceptions — three years after promising it would, and one week after shipping 1.0. The source lives in the company's public GitHub repo. The standard library has been open since 2024; the closed compiler was the last real lock. Modular is not taking compiler patches yet and says it wants to by year-end. A prebuilt compiler is still required if you are customizing MAX kernels. Last week's story was stability — Mojo 1.0 ships — Modular's AI-native language goes stable. Today's is whether a language now owned by Qualcomm, no longer pretending to be a Python superset, can grow a compiler community that is not just Modular employees with a Bazel cache.
If your town got a vote on the next AI campus, would you take the tax base or the quiet? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: NBC News · Techmeme · Gov. Josh Shapiro · Pennsylvania Governor's Office · Modular · Simon Willison · Modular (GitHub)
