Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

County ranked by announced AI data-center load

300 MW Announced AI load

Campuses

Lead operator

CoreWeave

Resi rate Δ (PPL)

-0.3%

Home price Δ (3y)

+9.7%

Property tax Δ (3y)

+3.4%

Population (2024 ACS)

558K

Median HH income (2024 ACS)

$86,959

Key takeaways

Lancaster County has 555,151 residents and a median household income of $83,703. The city of Lancaster has 58,039 residents and is 40.3% Hispanic, the largest non-Amish demographic concentration in any Pennsylvania AI county.Source: Census ACS 2023 B01003, B19013 (Lancaster County, PA) + sources[0] (Wikipedia: Lancaster, PA)
PPL Electric Utilities residential rates actually fell 0.3% from 2021 to 2023, the only cooling rate trajectory in any batch-3 county. The 300 MW CoreWeave Lancaster build is therefore one of the few AI campuses arriving without a baseline retail rate spike.Source: data/cache/utility_rate_yoy.csv (PPL Electric Utilities Corp, PA)
CoreWeave's $6 billion Lancaster build with Chirisa is scheduled to energize in 2027. Lancaster General Hospital remains the largest existing employer in the city at 9,406 workers, a baseline a single 300 MW AI campus could match at scale.Source: data/sites/data_centers.csv (Lancaster CoreWeave) + sources[0] (Wikipedia: Lancaster, PA)
Home prices rose 9.7% and property tax assessments rose only 3.4% over three years, the most restrained tax-side delta in any batch-3 county with a similar home-price rise. Pennsylvania's separate school-tax structure damps property-tax sensitivity to industrial assessments.Source: data/cache/realestate_yoy.csv + data/cache/property_tax_yoy.csv (FIPS 42071)

Lancaster County is 11.3% Hispanic countywide (62,574 residents), well above the Pennsylvania 8% average, with much of the concentration in the city of Lancaster itself. The CoreWeave campus lands in the most Latino county of any Pennsylvania AI build.Source: Census ACS 2023 B03003 (Lancaster County, PA)
Manufacturing employs 14.4% of Lancaster's workforce (40,467 jobs), the deepest industrial labor base of any Pennsylvania AI county. The Plain Sect (Amish and Mennonite) economy's emphasis on trades carpentry and metalwork feeds construction labor for the 300 MW Chirisa build.Source: Census ACS 2023 C24050 (Lancaster County, PA)
Lancaster's 3.3% unemployment rate is the lowest of any Pennsylvania batch-3 county. The CoreWeave Lancaster build will draw construction crews into a market that has been near structural full employment since 2022.Source: Census ACS 2023 B23025 (Lancaster County, PA)
Only 86.9% of Lancaster households have wired broadband, depressed by the rural Plain Sect population that often does not subscribe by religious choice. The county's connectivity gap is therefore cultural, not infrastructure-driven, in contrast to Schuylkill and Luzerne.Source: Census ACS 2023 B28002 (Lancaster County, PA)