A Canary in a Coal Mine: Amazon’s Luzerne County Data Center

Digital Colonialism, a series co-produced by NPQ and MediaJustice, explores how the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers is reshaping communities across the United States.

Between the environmental cost and questionable promisesof good jobs to people who need them, Amazon’s “investment” is a canary in a coal mine for places like northeastern Pennsylvania.

Luzerne County is in northeastern Pennsylvania, where anthracite coal miners powered the Industrial Revolution. For nearly a century, miners used canaries, small yellow-greenish songbirds known for their high metabolisms and rapid breathing, to detect toxic gases in the mines. When a canary showed signs of distress, it gave miners enough time to evacuate before succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning. The songbirds were replaced by electronic gas detectors more than 40 years ago, but the saying “canary in a coal mine” is still a common metaphor for potential danger.

In June, Amazon announced that it was investing $20 billion in data centers in the state, including one in Luzerne County next to a nuclear power plant. Data centers are demanding so much energy that entire coal plants previously scheduled for closure are being kept open to run them. Between the environmental cost and questionable promises of good jobs to people who need them, Amazon’s “investment” is a canary in a coal mine for places like northeastern Pennsylvania.

Lackawanna to the Susquehanna: The Cycle of Harm Received and Caused

“It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea,” wrote theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman in his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited.

I reflected on this quote from Thurman as I walked along the Lackawanna River, its water orange with acid mine drainage from the Old Forge Bore Hole.

To give a little history of the county, winding through the small towns and rural areas that mottle northeastern Pennsylvania, the rivers, creeks, and tributaries are but one place where our commonwealth’s rich and complicated history of immigration, organized labor, and resource extraction converge. The notion of this river answering its “call to the sea” kept me grounded in this place and its history. Perhaps this dying river is emblematic of the generations of struggle in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The orange waters of the Lackawanna River meet the Susquehanna River just north of Pittston, a small city on the northeastern edge of Luzerne County. While Pittston was an early beneficiary of the anthracite mining boom, the Knox Mine Disaster in 1959 devastated the region’s mining industry. For decades, the town sustained itself through industries like clothing manufacturing, with many factory workers belonging to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Today, nearly 23 percent of Pittston residents live below the poverty line, with women and girls making up a disproportionate number of that percentage.

For several years, Luzerne County’s age-adjusted suicide rates have exceeded the state average, and Pennsylvania’s overall “deaths of despair” rate was about 50 percent higherthan the national average.

Twenty miles downriver from Pittston is Nanticoke, named for the Algonquian-speaking Nentego (“tidewater people”). Mine owners’ insatiable thirst for anthracite profit overrode the Nentegos’ animism and foresight, leaving the water of the Espy Run Stream that flows through 200 acres of legacy mine land undrinkable for generations of Nanticoke residents.

From Nanticoke, the Susquehanna River flows southwest to Salem Township, home to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a nuclear power plant. If all goes according to plan, next door will be one of Amazon’s new data centers.

Public Policy Meets Everyday Pain

Through a highly resourced and disciplined 50-year strategy to undermine multiracial working-class gains, White people in places like Luzerne County have been bamboozled into blaming their pain on their Black, immigrant, and transgender neighbors. This trickery is led by the very people and corporations that want to keep us all down, divided, and desperate. The social and economic disparities are staggering:

• The suicide rate in Luzerne County increased between 2013 and 2023, while rates in neighboring counties decreased.
• For several years, Luzerne County’s age-adjusted suicide rates have exceeded the state average, and Pennsylvania’s overall “deaths of despair” rate was about 50 percent higher than the national average.
• Luzerne County has one of the highest drug overdose death rates in Pennsylvania.
• Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County’s largest city, has been referred to as “the most unhappy place in America,” linking high heroin use and overdose rates to economic immobility, largely caused by deindustrialization and loss of union jobs.

The largest employer, capitalizing on such despair in this county, is none other than Amazon.

The path paved for Amazon’s Pennsylvania data center takeover was much smoother than the area’s crumbling roads and structurally compromised rural bridges. This is thanks in part to a state program passed into law in 2016 and expanded in 2021—the Computer Data Center Equipment Exemption Program—which allows corporations like Amazon a sales tax exemption in exchange for a few dozen jobs. The law, conveniently, does not require reporting of the exempt transactions. That means that there is no way to track the amount of lost revenue—corporate tax dollars that could have gone toward public schools, public transportation, infrastructure, or support for Medicaid, which nearly one in four Luzerne County residents rely on for medical care. Simply put: Amazon wins and Pennsylvanians lose.

It’s not only corporate tax cuts for data centers that will continue to undermine Pennsylvanians’ quality of life. To see what’s coming for Luzerne County, we need only look to the , or the families in Granbury, TX, who are experiencing heart palpitations and chest pain, migraines, tinnitus, and hearing loss thanks to the exhaust fans of Bitcoin’s data center air-cooling system that runs 24/7.

Lessons Learned in Political, Economic, and People Power

Pennsylvanians have a choice to make: Learn from our history or repeat it.

We can draw lessons from the interconnectedness of politics, economics, and people power in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) strikes in the early 1900s. These strikes were the first time the US government engaged and went into negotiations with a labor union. Ohio Senator Mark Hanna had a political interest in resolving the massive 10-month labor strike two months before President McKinley’s reelection. Senator Hanna, a wealthy businessman, recognized the importance of economic power in politics. He moved J.P. Morgan, the owner of the Reading Railroad, to not only make concessions to UMWA, but to convince other industry bosses to do the same. On the other side of the table, UMWA recognized the influence wielded by the people. The labor union subsequently won higher wages for mine workers. However, they perhaps underestimated their political power when they dropped their demand for union recognition.

Are labor and trade unions today, understandably anticipating data center construction jobs, underestimating the political and economic power they have—or could have, as part of a broader strategic alignment? What does this history tell us about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s highly curated rollout of Amazon’s “investment” in data centers and his 2028 political aspirations? How can we, as organizers, build people power to wield economic power in order to influence political power?

Politicians’ loyalty is too often tied to who’s holding their bag, rather than the people who hire our elected officials with our votes. This disconnect has dire consequences: In 2025, only 17 percent of the US public said they trusted the government—one of the lowest rates in almost seven decades.

Shapiro is aligning himself with Big Tech, telling a story of bringing jobs to people who need them, but at a huge cost to a region where corporations like Amazon have already extracted so much.

The key for community and labor organizers to fight back is to have political maturity; a keen analysis to cut deals with people in power; vision and discipline to weigh risk and reward; and to do what civil rights activist Ella Baker called the “spadework” of movement building.

“The Spadework” for People, Planet, and Power

“People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves,” Baker once said.

The American consciousness often reduces social movements to prophetic voices of the few and mobilizations of the many. We do ourselves a disservice by overlooking the importance of long-term organizing—the slow and steady craft of developing everyday poor and working-class people into powerful, public leaders in our own communities. This is precisely what Baker meant by “spadework.”

It’s up to us as organizers to raise the stakes against the status quo and agitate poor and working-class people across race and place to see each other as our way out of despair.

While the theoretical debate of the future of AI and whether or not the data center bubble will burst rages on between “experts,” it doesn’t take an expert to know that tax breaks for billionaires and Big Tech aren’t going to solve our affordability crisis or cure what ails the soul of our country.

People in places like Luzerne County are in pain, and across ideologies, the system is broken. It’s up to us as organizers to raise the stakes against the status quo and agitate poor and working-class people across race and place to see each other as our way out of despair.

Community organizations, people of faith and moral courage, and labor unions need to build bridges of belief and belonging to offer our people an alternative vision of the world and do the spadework. It’s going to be up to all of us to rebuild civil society into one where we invest in infrastructure that allows all of us the tools we need to build a good life: safe and affordable housing; high quality public education for our kids; strong wages and dignity on the job; access to healthcare; and clean air and water for us and for generations to come.