Amazon’s data center rising on the old U.S. Steel land in Falls Township just did something it had not done before: it started handing money to the neighbors. In early July, the company announced $150,000 in grants to 22 Bucks County groups, from the Levittown-Fairless Hills Rescue Squad to the Bristol Riverside Theatre, all funded through a community pot it created alongside the project. The checks landed at a tense moment. The concrete-and-steel campus off New Falls Road is now more than half built, a petition against it has topped 3,800 names, and the two sides are set to meet face to face at a town hall this week.
It is the biggest private investment Lower Bucks has seen in a generation, and one of the most divisive. Here is what is actually going up, who is getting the grant money, why a growing group of residents wants it slowed down, and how you can weigh in.
A $20 billion bet, and Falls Township is on the ground floor
The Falls Township site is one piece of a much larger plan. In June 2025, Amazon and Governor Josh Shapiro announced the company would invest at least $20 billion across Pennsylvania to build cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure, which the state called the largest capital investment in its history. Two communities were named first: Falls Township in Bucks County and Salem Township in Luzerne County, with more sites under consideration. The company has said the statewide investment is expected to create at least 1,250 permanent high-skilled jobs, plus thousands more in the construction and supply chain that feeds a data center.
The Bucks County piece sits inside the Keystone Trade Center, the roughly 1,800-acre logistics park that developer NorthPoint Development is building on the former U.S. Steel Fairless Works property along the Delaware River. What began as a plan for four distribution warehouses was reworked into what the township calls a “digital infrastructure campus”: 10 buildings ranging from about 112,000 to 217,000 square feet, totaling more than two million square feet. Falls supervisors approved the plan in March 2025, and by June 2026 it was reported to be more than halfway to completion…