Ashley Avanzato wanted to move to Falls Township because of the school district. Her oldest child is autistic and New Jersey schools were not meeting his needs.
Just before Christmas, her family purchased a house, moved across the river to Pennsylvania and settled into the community. So far the experience has been everything that Avanzato could have hoped for — Pennsbury has been a great fit for the children.
The 34-year-old worries now that she might have to leave. After discovering that a data center is being built in the municipality, she is concerned about the effects the facility will have on her family.
“It would be a shame to have to leave because Pennsbury has been so great,” Avanzato said. “We’ve been seeing such great things in our child after moving.”
For some residents like Avanzato, it took over a year for news of the data center development to reach them, despite construction happening in their backyard. A growing number of Falls Township residents claim they were kept in the dark throughout the planning process and are now calling on township officials for transparency.
A timeline of events
NorthPoint Development — the group constructing the data center — received a noise variance from the Falls Township Zoning Hearing Board in August 2024. This marks the first mention of a data center on the Keystone Trade Center site in Levittown.
On March 22, 2025, the Falls Township Board of Supervisors shared the agenda of their twice monthly meeting. At the meeting on March 24, the board unanimously approved item five on their agenda, revising a NorthPoint plan to allow for the construction of a “digital infrastructure campus,” including a million-square-foot data center.
Two days later, the township shared news of the data center approval and in June announced Amazon will take control of the project.
Disjointed communication
At a contentious board of supervisors meeting on May 18, several Falls Township residents voiced concerns that township officials had been negligent in keeping community members updated on the data center’s development.
Jeffry Dence, chairman of the board, said that the township had done legal diligence of notifying residents of the new construction, including holding “at least” six public meetings.
“This isn’t something that was not advertised and that there weren’t any public meetings about,” Dence said.
In the biannual township newsletter — released on Aug. 19 2025 months after the approval of the data center — there was a story covering Amazon’s new construction.
Brooke Straiton previously worked as events and marketing manager for the Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce and presented NorthPoint with an award for business achievement in November 2023, nine months before the first public mention of a data center.
READ: Not Everyone Is Sold on the Benefits of Amazon’s Data Center Coming to Falls Township
When interviewing one of the company’s employees, she talked about their community work and how they were planning a lot of development. There was no mention of a future data center.
After watching a recording of the board of supervisors meeting, Straiton said that Dence “rubbed me wrong” when speaking about the fact that the township provided the legal requirement of notifying residents.
Straiton never received the newsletter containing this announcement. In fact in the 10 years she has lived in Falls Township, she noted that she has never received any township newsletter.
The North Park resident said social media updates were no more reliable for township information.
“I don’t know how many times they posted, but I didn’t know that they were doing this, that they were switching it over,” Straiton said. “So I find that very shady.”
In an effort to increase future community dialogue, Dence said on May 18 that “the township would look to arrange a town hall meeting.” No discussion has been planned at this point and Dence did not respond to the Beacon’s request for comment.
Growing opposition
Straiton only became aware of the data center construction through a post Amanda Westerman, another Falls Township resident, made in a Facebook group about how she was speaking out against the planned data center.
The mother of three first became aware of the environmental impacts of data centers designed for artificial intelligence after a trend went viral in early 2026, with chat bot users creating caricatures of themselves with programs like ChatGPT.
“At that point when those caricatures became trendy on social media, I started looking into and realizing what the water consumption was and what it took out as far as water supply to create that caricature,” Westerman said.
Large data centers — like the one under construction in Levittown — require up to 5 million gallons of fresh water every day to cool servers, the same amount of usage as a city of 50,000 people according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
The most recent census data estimates that Levittown has a population of 52,699. Once constructed, Amazon’s new data center could use almost the same amount of water as the entire community.
READ: Bucks County Is the Newest Frontier in the Data Center Boom. Buyer Beware
“Here I am now staying up late at night reading articles, watching videos, really going down that rabbit hole,” Westerman said.
This research led her to a discovery — a data center was being built in her backyard.
Westerman wondered if other residents were unaware of the construction in their community and started a conversation in the What’s Up Falls Township Facebook group.
“The conversation just really took off, a lot of residents were majority speaking along the same lines,” Westerman said. “They were under a different impression of what was actually going in there, and even for some who knew that it was a data center, they didn’t know exactly that it was a specific AI data center.”
After waking up the next day “even angrier” about the situation, she decided to create a petition on May 17 — currently at 2,566 signers — calling for a moratorium on data center construction in Falls Township, tighter regulations and increased transparency.
“I was born and raised in Bucks County — my whole entire life — and I’ve lived in Falls township for almost 14 years,” Westerman said. “I care very much what goes on here.”
Moving out
Since arriving in Falls Township, Avanzato heard no updates about the data center from officials. Like others in the community, she only became aware of the construction from Westerman’s Facebook posts.
After seeing recent news of Vineland, New Jersey residents unable to drink tap water or wash their laundry, allegedly caused by the construction of a 2.6 million-square-foot data center, Avanzato fears the same could happen in her town.
“We’ll leave Falls Township,” Avanzato said. “Our kids are our number one priority.”
