This page answers the questions we hear most often about Project Forge. We have tried to answer them plainly, including where the answer is complicated or where work is still underway. Every regulatory document referenced here is public, and we have linked to the sources at the end so you can read them yourself. 

About the project

What is Project Forge?

Project Forge is a data center campus under development on South Bacton Hill Road in East Whiteland Township, on
part of the former Foote Mineral property. A data center is a secure building that houses computer servers and the
power and cooling equipment that keeps them running.

Sentinel Data Centers is the developer and has been developing data centers since 2002 for customers including
technology companies, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and other data-intensive users.

The approved plan is for two (2) two-story buildings with a basement level. 

The development will utilize dramatically less density than in-place zoning allows. The buildings will occupy less than 12% of the ~100-acre site, or ~16% of the portion of the site that is in East Whiteland Township against the 30% that Township’s zoning would allow. Total impervious surface will be roughly 25% across the whole site, or ~34% across the portion of the site in East Whiteland Township, well under the 60% that the Township’s zoning would allow.  Said differently, ~75 acres of the ~100 acre property will remain open non-impervious ground.

While the buildings will be heavily screened with landscaping and berms (see below), we have hired Gensler Architects, a pre-eminent national firm with a commitment to architectural excellence and to design buildings that fit their surroundings rather than stand apart from them.

Please see building rendering here. An interactive series of renderings from different vantage points around the project and neighborhood will be available on this website shortly. As renderings indicate, all backup standby generators will be placed indoors. The equipment yards adjacent to the buildings will contain cooling equipment and will be screened with architectural precast panels and sound walls.

The project includes reforestation and landscaping of the acreage along Swedesford Road, which previously served as a sewage lagoon before an environmental remediation was completed in 2024. The approved plan includes 442 new trees.

The campus is on parcels adjacent to the former Foote Mineral quarry area on South Bacton Hill Road. It is important to be precise about this, because it is a common point of confusion: the capped portion of the Superfund site sits on a separate tax parcel, 42-3-130, and no construction is taking place on that parcel. The environmental cap on that parcel will not be disturbed.

Variance relief to develop the property with a data center was granted by the Township Zoning Board in both 2018 and 2021. The land development plan received preliminary approval from the Board of Supervisors on June 12, 2024 and final approval with conditions on August 14, 2024. After the Township confirmed the conditions of approval had been satisfied, the plan was recorded with the Chester County Recorder of Deeds on March 31, 2026.

Construction will take approximately two years, with the majority of the physical building construction complete within one year and the remainder interior fitout. The new trees and landscaping along Swedesford will be installed in Spring 2027.

The former foote mineral site

Is the site still listed as a Superfund site?

Yes. Foote Mineral was added to the National Priorities List in 1992 and remains on it. Groundwater monitoring is ongoing, and EPA has not proposed delisting.

We want to be straightforward about this, because it has been a source of confusion. A listed site is not the same as an un-remediated site. EPA’s selected remedy for Foote Mineral — consolidating and capping contaminated material and removing certain impacted soils off-site — was carried out. As with many remediated sites where ground water has been impacted, monitoring groundwater over the long term is ongoing. Sites where material is capped in place remain listed, with five-year reviews and permanent land use controls, because those protections are meant to last. Continued listing means the oversight continues. It does not mean the cleanup did not happen.

Please refer here to a FAQ page on the project’s environmental status provided by EPA.

EPA has reviewed the construction plans for this project. An EPA spokesperson, Mike Bastasch, said in June 2026:

“Based on a careful review of construction plans by EPA subject matter experts, the agency does not anticipate the development to impact the remedy at the Foote Mineral Co. Superfund site.”

EPA also said it remains engaged and will continue monitoring redevelopment progress to ensure the remedy stays intact. We welcome that oversight and expect it to continue throughout construction.

Separately, in an April 30, 2026 letter, EPA confirmed that the development is limited to parcels adjacent to the capped parcel, that no construction or other work will occur on the capped parcel, and that there have been no violations of the environmental covenant that protects it.

Yes. In January 2026, EPA published guidance titled Guidance on the Redevelopment of Superfund and Brownfield Sites as AI Data Centers, developed under Executive Order 14318 on Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure. The guidance directs EPA to identify Superfund and brownfield sites for this kind of reuse and to help return them to productive use, provided caps and remediation systems remain undisturbed.

Returning a long-idle and previously burdened industrial property to commercial use, with the cap untouched and federal oversight continuing, is precisely the outcome that policy contemplates.

No. The capped disposal area sits on tax parcel 42-3-130, which carries a recorded environmental covenant from 2017. That parcel is not part of this development, and no construction or other work is taking place on it. EPA confirmed this in writing in April 2026.

No contaminated soil is being excavated. As an additional precaution, before redevelopment work began a Health and Safety Plan and a Soil Management Plan were submitted to EPA for review, and both were reviewed by the agency and by the Township’s independent environmental consultants.

The erosion and sedimentation control permit issued by the Township carries specific conditions for soil monitoring and reporting, dust control, and protection of the Superfund remedy. Township inspectors are on site regularly. If airborne particulate levels approach a conservative threshold, work stops.

The basement is part of the plan as approved in August 2024 and was reviewed through the full land development process by the Township engineer and its technical consultants.

Some have suggested that heavy equipment cannot be structurally supported on a floor above a basement. That is not correct. Data centers across the country place equipment loads above basement levels, and on second, third and fourth floors. Designing floors for heavy loads is routine structural engineering. All structural design for this project is signed and sealed by licensed Pennsylvania engineers and is reviewed by the Township’s third-party code official.

The low point of the basement will be ~25’ higher elevation than the groundwater that EPA monitors at this site and will not be disturbed by the presence or construction of the basements.

Water

Will the project draw from groundwater or affect nearby private wells?

The project does not draw water from the water table on site. The only wells on the property are monitoring wells, used solely for EPA’s ongoing groundwater monitoring program.

The project’s water is supplied by Aqua Pennsylvania from its regional system, not from any source on or near the site. We are funding the full cost of extending Aqua’s service to the property, and the design is required by local ordinance to maintain system pressure so that other customers are not affected.

The data center cooling system will evaporate 2.8M gallons of water per day at peak but is expected to evaporate on average less due to seasonal and weather fluctuations and part load conditions.

The facility will also use potable water similar to that of a light commercial office use (lavatories, sinks, etc.) for the employees that occupy the facility.

Power, backup power and the electrical grid

Is primary combustion generation and/or gas turbine power being installed on site?

No. This is a grid-served facility. It does not generate its own primary power onsite, a very important distinction, and no gas-fired generating plant is part of the project.  Reports that turbines or any other form of primary power generation are being installed on site are incorrect.

The facility will have an ability to draw a maximum peak of 290 megawatts. Average daily usage will be lower than this.

No. The developer bears the full cost of any grid infrastructure that this project requires, including off-site upgrades to the utility’s general 230kV infrastructure. The facility is located adjacent to a major 230kV transmission easement that runs through Chester County and shares a lot line with PECO’s Planebrook Substation that used to directly serve a multitude of industrial uses in the immediate vicinity (including Foote Mineral).

PECO has prepared a document explaining data centers and their impact on the electrical grid, which is available in the Township’s public document library for this project. In the Findings section of this document, PECO states “Based on assumptions in this analysis, anticipated impacts of data center projects on residential customers ranges from neutral to modestly favorable depending on specific projects and treatment of already planned transmission investments.”

The facility has standby generators, housed indoors, which exist for one purpose: keeping systems running if utility power fails. They are not a source of ongoing power and do not run continuously. These generators are intended to run only during a major regional transmission failure. The last event of that kind affecting this location was the 2003 Northeast blackout which lasted approximately seven hours. Aside from 230kV transmission outages such as this, these generators are only run for short-duration monthly testing during daytime hours. The generators reside indoors with indoor acoustic dampening and are fitted with EPA Tier 4 equivalent controls with diesel particulate filters and catalytic aftertreatment which dramatically reduce emissions during the infrequent periods in which the generators run (i.e. for testing and during grid-wide emergencies).

Noise, traffic and the surrounding neighborhood

How loud will it be?

The project has been designed to operate well within East Whiteland Township’s noise limits. Equipment yards are enclosed by acoustic sound walls, equipment is fitted with sound attenuation, and earthen berms and landscaping provide additional screening. An independent acoustical engineer has modeled the site to assist with the design and to validate the anticipated noise levels via best-practice modeling that has been reviewed by the Township’s independent acoustical engineer.   In any event, just like all uses in the Township, the data center must operate within the parameters of the Township Code.

The buildings are 640 feet from the closest home. 

During normal operations, these buildings generate very little vehicle traffic, materially less than alternative uses such as office or retail.

Exterior lighting is minimal and will use shielded fixtures and full cutoff / dark-sky compliant measures to avoid light spill onto neighboring properties.

We are not going to promise what the housing market will do, and we would be skeptical of anyone who did. The best independent evidence we are aware of is a May 2026 Brookings Institution study of 93 U.S. counties that received their first large data center between 2008 and 2024. Comparing those counties with similar counties where announced facilities were cancelled, Brookings found a modest increase in county-level home prices of 2 to 5 percent over the following decade, with local wages unchanged. That is county-wide data, not a prediction for any particular street, and we cite it for what it is: the most careful evidence available that data center development has not been associated with declining home values.

A data center is, at its core, a building full of computer equipment, served by the same kinds of commercial chillers and electrical distribution systems found in hospitals, office towers and university campuses. Thousands operate across the United States, many in dense urban areas, with people working inside them and living and working around them. Major public health agencies have not identified a health risk from living or working near a data center.

The one operational emissions source is periodic generator testing, described above — brief, infrequent and subject to a Pennsylvania DEP air permit and the emissions controls fitted to the units. 

Electromagnetic fields (EMF) are sometimes raised on social media. All electrical equipment produces EMF, and its strength falls off rapidly with distance from the source. Outside a data center’s walls, EMF levels are indistinguishable from those outside any other commercial building, and lower than what common household appliances produce at close range. Decades of research reviewed by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and other bodies have not established a health effect from EMF at the levels found near commercial buildings.

Community and Local Impact

What does this mean for local taxes and schools?

East Whiteland Township is within the Great Valley School District. A facility of this scale generates substantial real property tax revenue for the Township, Chester County and the school district — without adding students to the district or placing meaningful demand on municipal services, which distinguishes it from residential development of comparable assessed value.

Jobs come in two phases, and it is worth being clear about both.

During construction, a project of this size supports a large workforce of hundreds over roughly two years — electricians, mechanical and plumbing contractors, steel and concrete crews, and site work. 

Once operating, the permanent on-site workforce will provide roughly 100 positions covering facilities engineering, security, network operations and maintenance. These are skilled, well-paid jobs.

The larger economic effect is indirect. According to a 2025 analysis by PwC, each direct job in the U.S. data center industry supports more than six additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, through construction, electrical and mechanical contracting, telecommunications, equipment supply and local services.

The parcel is zoned for institutional use and has carried development approvals before. From 2002 to 2012 it was approved for Whiteland Village, an 850-unit continuing care retirement community, and two miles of offsite sanitary sewer main were constructed to serve it before the 2008 economic downturn ended that project.

The realistic alternatives to this project are other forms of commercial or institutional development, most of which would generate considerably more daily traffic and more demand on local services.

our plan

What are you building?

We are building the approved 2024 land development plan.

In early 2025, we attempted to modify the plan to increase the gross building footprint,  reconfigure the shape of the buildings, change the cooling systems from water to air and enhance certain landscaping and site features. This process was met with community resistance and we ultimately decided to build the plan exactly as approved. We subsequently requested a field change limited to modification of the cooling systems from water-consuming systems to air-cooled systems. This request was also met with resistance from anti-data center interests and ultimately tabled by the Board of Supervisors with no clear pathway to resolution and we are, as such, building the plan as approved.

Legal challenges to the approved data center were filed in early 2026.  In June 2026, Chester County Court of Common Pleas Judge Anthony Verwey denied those challenges.  Another legal challenge to the data center was also filed this year with the Chester County Court.  That challenge was withdrawn by the parties who filed it. No further challenges are currently pending.

We will respond to all questions about the project asked in good faith. Please submit questions here.

reference documents

All of the following are public.