A proposed data center expected to cost more than $5 billion met fierce resistance Thursday night in rural Pennsylvania, where residents packed a town hall at Bangor Area Middle School and spent three hours pressing developers for answers about the Lower Mount Bethel Tech Center. About three dozen people spoke during public comment, and none backed the project.

Developers described the proposal as a 1.2-gigawatt data center on a 450-acre site in Lower Mount Bethel Township, with plans they said could produce 500 full-time jobs, hundreds of construction positions and $7 million to $8 million in annual tax revenue for the township. The meeting was organized by the project's major stakeholders, including Peron Development and J.G. Petrucci Co.

What they did not provide was just as striking as what they did. Developers did not say how many buildings the campus would include, how large the structures would be or how they would be laid out across the property. There is also no confirmed end-user for the facility, leaving residents to weigh a massive industrial proposal without knowing who would ultimately occupy it.

That uncertainty helped fuel the opposition. Several speakers rejected the idea that farmland is empty land waiting for a more profitable use, pushing back on the premise that the township's fields should be treated as underused space for industrial development. Their objections also reflected broader concerns about farmland, local control and the community identity tied to the land.

The fight in Lower Mount Bethel is part of a larger debate playing out in rural communities over whether farmland should be reclassified as a place for data center growth. For now, the project faces a wall of public resistance, and the unanswered questions about the buildout and end-user may matter as much as the jobs and tax revenue developers are promising.