Your Client Is About to Ask You About a Data Center
More than ten Western PA counties now have active, approved, or under-construction data center projects. Your clients are already researching it. Here's what you need before the question comes.
A buyer tours a house in Canonsburg. They like it. Then they pull up something on their phone — a data center project a few miles down the road — and ask what it means for the offer they were about to write. You have about four seconds to answer in a way that keeps the deal alive.
The agent who has the facts keeps that client. The agent who says "I wouldn't worry about it" loses them — because the client already worried about it, on the drive over. Waving off a concern someone researched themselves doesn't read as confidence. It reads as not knowing. So here's what you need before the question comes.
This Is Not Theoretical
Western Pennsylvania is not watching the AI infrastructure buildout from the sidelines. It is in the middle of it. More than ten Western PA counties now have active, approved, or under-construction data center projects. Allegheny County alone has 23 operating facilities today — Downtown, Wilkinsburg, Ross Township, Tarentum. Homer City, in Indiana County, has steel in the ground: 4,500 MW on the site of a former coal plant, the largest project planned in Pennsylvania. Beaver County has 4.1 GW across four projects, including Project Phoenix at Shippingport.
Note the word on Project Phoenix: approved. Not proposed. That distinction matters when you're advising a client on a proximity decision, and most agents don't track it closely enough to get it right.
Washington County Is the One to Watch
Washington County borders Allegheny County to the south — directly adjacent to Canonsburg, McMurray, Peters Township, and the rest of the South Hills market. Five data center projects are now tracked there. One is already active. Land advertisement activity in Robinson Township means site preparation is already moving. South Strabane Township has a proposed project on roughly 1,500 acres — a large footprint close to neighborhoods your clients are buying in right now. If you work the South Hills, this stopped being a future story. It's a present-tense market fact.
Two Things Are True at the Same Time
Realtor.com's Q4 2025 cross-market analysis named Pittsburgh as an AI and cloud data-center development hub. Out-of-market buyer traffic to the metro climbed from 30.5% to roughly 55% over six years. The leading source of that inbound interest: Washington, DC. Buyers priced out of the Northern Virginia data center corridors are looking here. That's a buyer pipeline, not a macro headline.
At the same time, Gallup found that roughly seven in ten Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area. A Redfin/Ipsos survey put neighborhood-level opposition at 47%. Both are true. The demand is real and the skepticism is real. The top-producing agent is the one who can hold both in the same conversation — and most can't, because they only know one half of the story.
Client Concerns Often Focus on the Wrong Risk
When a client raises a data center, they almost always lead with property value. It's the wrong fear. Consumer advocate Erin Brockovich runs a crowd-sourced national map of data center concerns. Sort the reports by what communities actually worry about, and the order is clear: water is first at 41.2%, electricity and grid strain at 22.2%, health at 18.1%. Property values come in last — 1.2%.
National analysis shows fewer than 1% of host ZIP codes see value declines attributable to data center proximity. Allegheny County's 23 active facilities have produced zero documented residential value impact. That is not an opinion. That is your closing argument.
The move is not to dismiss the client's concern. It's to redirect it — from a vague worry about value to specific questions that actually have answers. How close, exactly? Public water or a private well? What does the noise modeling at the property line show? Those are answerable. "Will this hurt my home's value" mostly isn't a live question, because the data already answered it.
One real concern worth naming honestly: utility bills. Duquesne Light has filed for roughly a 15% rate increase; West Penn Power, about 9% — both tied in part to grid upgrades. Whether that trend continues depends on HB 1834, a bill in Harrisburg that would require data centers, not households, to carry grid upgrade costs. The honest answer to a client is: modest increases now, direction unclear, legislation pending. Honest beats confident here.
This Is an Edge, Not a Liability
Almost no agent in this market has the county-by-county picture. Washington County, Lawrence County, the full Beaver County story, the facilities already running in Butler and Armstrong counties — invisible to most agents. That gap is the opportunity.
The client asking about a data center isn't testing whether you like data centers. They're testing whether you did the homework. trackdatacenters.com is free, current, and shows exactly what's active, proposed, and approved in any county. Pull the data before the listing appointment, not during it.
The next twelve months will bring turbine deliveries at Homer City, a Senate vote on HB 1834, and zoning filings in Robinson Township. Every one of those is a headline your clients will see. The question isn't whether they'll ask you about it. It's whether your answer sounds like you read the brief — or like you're hoping the subject changes.