What is Project Laurel?
Project Laurel is a proposed 750 MW data center campus spanning 192 acres in Limerick Township, Montgomery County, PA. The developer, MDC 7 LLC, plans eight two-story buildings standing 85 feet tall, totaling about 2.8 million square feet -- five 154,000-square-foot buildings and three 202,000-square-foot facilities. The site is bounded by Sanatoga Road to the south, Evergreen Road to the west, Possum Hollow Road to the east, and Lightcap Road to the north.
The facility would consume at least 750,000 gallons of water per day -- more than it takes to fill an Olympic swimming pool. PECO, the local utility, has reportedly secured 750 megawatts of electric capacity for the site.
The name of the actual tenant remains shielded behind a non-disclosure agreement. Residents and elected officials have been unable to learn who will operate the facility or what it will be used for.
The game lands swap
The Pennsylvania Game Commission voted 6-3 to approve a land swap giving Limerick Town Center LLC a 55-acre parcel of State Game Lands 234, plus a 200-foot right-of-way across remaining state land, immediately adjacent to the data center site. Local residents say they had no input into the deal and only learned about it after the fact.
Sen. Katie Muth (D-Chester/Montgomery) has been one of the most vocal critics. She has said any location near high-voltage transmission lines is a sitting duck for data centers. In February 2026, she circulated a memo to all Senate members proposing a three-year statewide moratorium on hyperscale data center development, to give local governments time to study environmental, energy, and community impacts before more projects move forward.
In early 2026, the Limerick Board of Supervisors voted to send a letter of opposition to Harrisburg regarding the land swap, formally joining residents in objecting to the state's decision.
Limerick fights back
On March 5, 2026, the Limerick Board of Supervisors voted 3-0 to direct the township solicitor to draft amendments to the data center zoning ordinance. The existing rules only address noise; the supervisors want protections for water pollution, air pollution, and vibration monitoring.
In April, the Limerick Township Planning Commission held a three-hour-plus public hearing on Project Laurel's conditional use application. Hundreds of residents attended, forcing the meeting into a local high school auditorium. The Planning Commission voted to recommend that the Board of Supervisors NOT approve the conditional use unless a laundry list of specific conditions are met:
- A closed-loop cooling system (no open evaporative water use) - Additional analysis of vibration impacts on neighboring properties - A binding requirement that the facility's hum be imperceptible at the data-center property boundary - An annual sound study to verify compliance
The recommendation is advisory. The Board of Supervisors will make the final determination through a quasi-judicial public hearing process in the coming weeks. Either way, the planning commission vote is a rare public rebuke of a secret-tenant project at the local level.
Why it matters
Project Laurel illustrates a pattern playing out across Pennsylvania: state-level land deals greasing the path for data centers that consume massive amounts of water and power, with the people who live next to them kept in the dark. Pennsylvania now ranks as the fourth fastest-growing state for data center development, with about 90 billion dollars in announced AI, energy, and data center investments and 52 projects in early planning or under construction.
The Planning Commission's conditional recommendation in April matters well beyond Limerick. It sets a playbook any other Pennsylvania township can reach for: you do not have to deny the project outright; you can make approval contingent on terms the developer may not be willing to accept. Closed-loop cooling commitments in particular are a direct constraint on data-center water use that, if enforced, would force developers to disclose cooling architecture before the conditional-use hearing rather than after.