Real estate developer Derek Strine plans to transform the former Pennhurst State School and Hospital — a 130-acre site near Philadelphia, infamous for its history of abuse and later reborn as the Pennhurst Asylum haunted attraction — into a massive data center powering the artificial intelligence boom. The proposed project, requiring enough electricity for 400,000 homes, faces community opposition over environmental and historical concerns. Strine argues the redevelopment will bring tax revenue, jobs, and modernization, betting that preparing the land for AI infrastructure will attract major tech investors. Once a symbol of neglect and later a horror destination, Pennhurst may now become a hub for America’s digital future. Bloomberg’s Dawn Lim reports:
About an hour’s drive northwest of Philadelphia, the ruins of a state-run medical institute rise from the banks of the Schuylkill River.
It’s here where real estate developer Derek Strine has been scaring locals for years. His haunted attraction, Pennhurst Asylum, every fall hosts tens of thousands of visitors for a well-controlled fright.
But Strine has a new idea for the property, one that has some locals even more disturbed: He wants to turn the nearly 130-acre grounds into a world-class data center, the kind of massive server facility that is central to the artificial intelligence boom. […]
Pennhurst opened in 1908 as the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. The self-contained colony for the intellectually and developmentally disabled housed some 3,300 people in the late 1960s, a thousand more people than it was built for. What was by then known as Pennhurst State School and Hospital controlled inmates through medication and confinement to seclusion rooms. […]
Because the property is zoned “industrial mixed use,” he tacked on plans for a carbon black plant, a manufacturing facility that heats up tires to extract carbon. In township meetings, one resident called the proposed plant a “poison pill” to get the community to accept a data center. Others said the data center was a “smokescreen” and “threat” to get them to accept the plant.
Strine backed off and said all he wanted to build was a data center and an accompanying office building to meet the “mixed use” requirement. […]
Strine thinks East Vincent will come around when the township of some 7000 sees the tax benefits and improvements to the school district. Among the slew of upsides, he said, a data center would generate less traffic because it doesn’t need that many people. […]
“The upsides of the data center would be there would be no more haunted house,” Conroy said.
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