Grassroots resistance to data centers is creating some strange bedfellows with Republican lawmakers who are typically not on the side of environmentalists leading the calls for a moratorium on data center development.

Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition, one of the groups leading statewide opposition to data center expansion, said she can’t remember an environmental issue that unified people across the political spectrum in the same way.

“Everybody’s saying the same thing for once,” she said. “Once we stop playing the roles they like to play us, as adversaries, we are kind of unstoppable. And I think that’s what we’re saying now, that people are pushing back.”

Feridun said Gov. Josh Shapiro and Democrats opened the door for Republicans to enter the fray and stand with data center opponents. Shapiro’s data centers guardrails don’t go far enough to protect community members, she said.

“I call it governor slop,” she said. “We get no protections. We get somebody who’s actually got no daylight between his position on energy and Trump.”

On many issues of environmental concern, politicians and members of the public may see a positive economic benefit that offsets the environmental concerns. With data centers, few members of the public see any tangible benefit from them, and they say the potential harms, such as gobbling up water and driving up electric bills, are alarming.

An April Muhlenberg College poll found that just 12% of people surveyed said they consider the impact of fracking in Pennsylvania to be a crisis, with 43% saying they considered fracking a problem but not a crisis. A comparable number of people surveyed said they consider data centers to be a problem, but twice as many people said data centers are a crisis.

“You’ll have MAGA individuals alongside straight up, you know, Bernie Sanders progressives, and they’re unified on this issue,” Chris Borick, a political science professor and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, told CapitolWire/State Affairs in an interview Thursday. “In this world, anything that brings people across partisan divides, I think is of note.”

Feridun said that in drought conditions, regulators will direct fracking operators to stop using water. But data centers need the water for cooling and cannot operate without them, meaning it would be difficult to roll back or halt water withdrawals for data centers once they are approved.

“There was a meeting in Washington County, and somebody asked outright, who gets the water if there’s a drought,” she said. “And they said, ‘the data center.'”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for moratoriums on new data centers. Days after winning the Republican nomination to run for governor, Treasurer Stacy Garrity announced she thinks the state should implement a “pause” on new data center development and accused Shapiro of flip-flopping on the issue after he rolled out new guidelines for data center operators to get state support.

Shapiro has repeatedly defended the need to develop artificial intelligence infrastructure as a national security issue as the U.S. tries to keep pace with China in the tech race.

But unlike many types of industrial activity that raise environmental concerns, data centers have been generating bipartisan pushback from both the public and, increasingly, rank and file lawmakers.

Sen. Rosemary Brown, R-Monroe, on Thursday renewed her call for a moratorium to give state and local officials the opportunity to update state laws and regulations and local ordinances.

“People are not against progress, and they understand what modern technology needs, but they deserve real answers before decisions are made that could permanently impact their neighborhoods, infrastructure, water resources and quality of life,” Brown said. “Residents have raised legitimate concerns about energy demand, utility costs, environmental impacts, traffic, noise and whether local infrastructure can truly support these developments.”

Brown is a cosponsor of Senate Bill 1359, a data center moratorium bill introduced Thursday by Sen. Katie Muth, D-Montgomery. The legislation would bar new hyperscale data centers for three years.

Lawmakers in New York on Thursday voted to send Gov. Kathy Hochul legislation that would make that state the first to enact a formal one-year moratorium on new data centers for one year.

In addition, a pair of Republican lawmakers introduced House Bill 2533 and Senate Bill 1345

Track on May 27 authorizing local governments to ban data centers.

Sen. Jarrett Coleman, R-Lehigh, and Rep. Jamie Walsh, R-Luzerne, also introduced a bill that would eliminate the data center tax break and direct the state to funnel the money that would have gone for the data center tax credit to reduce the state’s gas tax.

The state is projected to lose $188 million in revenue in 2026-27 due to the data center tax break. But with the number of data centers in the state poised to grow exponentially, state officials have forecasted that the tax credit could cost the state more than $500 million by 2030-31.