Emilia Doda wasn’t trying to become a watchdog. She was just looking for answers.

When a data center was proposed across the street from her childhood home in Blakely, near Scranton, she went searching for details.

What she found was a wall of inaccessible information buried across government websites, zoning filings, and local news archives that most people would never think to check.

So she built her own tool.

The result is the Pennsylvania Data Center Proposal Tracker, a free public database and interactive mapping platform that follows proposed, planned, approved, and under-construction data center projects across the Commonwealth.

Users can sort by size, status, and electrical capacity, trace project timelines, and dig into information drawn from public records, local publications, and corporate announcements.

When Doda launched the site last August, she was tracking around 20 proposals. Today there are more than 50 active projects statewide.

That trajectory, more than doubling in less than a year, is not an abstraction. It means warehouses full of servers, drawing enormous amounts of power and water, are being proposed in Pennsylvania communities faster than most residents can keep up.

The tracker helps people keep up.

It also helps them understand the scale of what’s coming. The proposed Wildcat Ridge site in Archbald, for example, is large enough to fit approximately 133 Walmarts and 5,000 Sheetz stores.

That kind of comparison does what raw acreage numbers rarely can. It makes the footprint real.

Doda, a Lackawanna County native who now lives in Silicon Valley, built the site while working on video game programming, photography, and freelance web development.

She was initially reluctant to be publicly identified as its creator.

She didn’t want to be seen as an authority on data centers, just someone who believed communities deserved better access to information. “I thought it was so valuable that people, just general communities, had this information,” she said.

That information is increasingly consequential. Residents and environmental groups across Pennsylvania are pushing back hard, raising concerns about energy demand, water use, noise, and the pace of development in neighborhoods that had little say in the matter.

A Facebook group organized to help Pennsylvanians fight data center development topped 500 members within days of launching.

In February, opponents scored a concrete victory when Montour County commissioners denied a proposed rezoning that would have cleared the way for a new facility.

The tracker sits at the center of all of it.

A resource for residents monitoring projects near their homes, community groups preparing for public hearings, journalists chasing story leads, planners tracking growth patterns, and researchers studying the long-term impact of an industry expanding faster than the regulations meant to govern it.

For Delaware Valley residents, it offers something simple but increasingly rare: an early warning. A chance to know what’s being proposed in your community before the bulldozers arrive and before most people even know a proposal exists.

The Pennsylvania Data Center Proposal Tracker is free to explore at padatacenterproposals.com.

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