96 Pennsylvania Landowners Just Split $586 Million for a Data Center Campus. The Utility Building Its Power Plants Hasn't Signed a Contract Yet.

Doyle Watts owns land in Salem Township, a rural stretch of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where cornfields back up against state game lands and the Susquehanna River isn't far off. Earlier this year, he sold it. The buyer was QTS, the Blackstone-backed data center developer, and Watts was one of 96 landowners who together closed on roughly 1,700 acres for a combined $586 million, with individual payouts ranging from about $1 million to more than $35 million. Watts has said the money let him retire years earlier than he'd planned. That's one ending to this story, and it's already final: the deal closed, the title transferred, the checks cleared. The data center campus that land is supposed to become doesn't have an ending yet.

The sale itself was organized by 4-3 Consulting, a land-assembly firm run by Jack Sordoni, who has built a small industry out of stitching together Luzerne County farmland for data center developers. It's the same firm behind Salem 3, the 4,466-acre overlay expansion the township approved in late October in exchange for a promised emergency room. Salem Township is now home to at least three separate data center projects in various stages of land assembly, zoning, and construction, on top of an existing campus built next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant. What none of those stories answered, until this month, was who is actually going to power the original QTS campus, the one built on Watts's old land, and on what terms.

A term sheet is not a signed contract

PPL Corporation answered part of that question on November 6th, in its third-quarter earnings call, with considerably more detail than Salem Township's roughly 1,400 residents have ever gotten from the companies building next door to them. Invitium Energy, PPL's joint venture with Blackstone Infrastructure, has agreed to key commercial terms with QTS for roughly 2 gigawatts of generation serving the Salem Township campus. The portfolio is two combined-cycle natural gas plants, plus fuel cells and batteries. PPL CEO Vince Sorgi called it "a significant milestone for Invitium Energy" on the call, and used the deal, along with a broader surge in data center demand, to raise PPL's long-term earnings growth target to 7% to 9% through 2030, backed by a $25 billion capital plan, about $2 billion more than the plan it replaces. PPL's advanced-stage data center pipeline in Pennsylvania now runs to roughly 35.3 gigawatts, with 11.4 gigawatts under signed electric service agreements and 8.5 gigawatts already under construction. That is a real number, describing real investment, and it's the best evidence yet that the generation to serve this corridor isn't just a developer's talking point.

It's also, by PPL's own description, not a done deal. What Invitium and QTS actually signed is a nonbinding term sheet; final agreements are still pending. The batteries are targeted for around 2029. The two gas plants aren't expected online until 2032 and 2033, under a contract structure where QTS would pay a fixed monthly charge covering capital and fixed operating costs, plus variable payments tied to fuel use, over an initial 20-year term with multiple five-year renewal options. PPL's own financial disclosures exclude the project from its base capital plan entirely, and Invitium's agreement with QTS includes a cost-reimbursement clause covering development costs if the permits and approvals the plants need never materialize. That's the same evidence-ladder question GridPermit's Kill Test applies to every developer claim about a signed power deal: a term sheet describes an intention two companies have agreed to pursue. It is not the agreement itself, and PPL is telling its own shareholders exactly that distinction, in writing, even while a press release elsewhere calls it a milestone.

PPL's $25 billion capital increase isn't driven by Pennsylvania alone, and the other half of it makes the same point from a different state. A big piece of the new money is earmarked for a proposed 645-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant in Kentucky, targeting commercial operation in the second quarter of 2032, contingent on approval from the Kentucky Public Service Commission. That commission has rejected PPL's requests to build new gas capacity before. Kentucky spending under the plan is set to jump from $2.3 billion this year to $3.6 billion next year, all of it premised on a regulatory outcome nobody can guarantee. A capital plan is a company's best estimate of what it intends to spend. It isn't a permit, and it isn't a signed interconnection agreement, in Kentucky or in Salem Township.

The part of the deal nobody voted on

Salem Township's own record has a harder problem than an unsigned term sheet. Ernest Ashbridge III, a township supervisor, signed a non-disclosure agreement involving Amazon in 2024 and a second one involving QTS in 2025, while Amazon and QTS were separately negotiating to build campuses in the township he helped govern. Ashbridge is no longer on the board of supervisors. Property records show that in April of this year, he sold his own home to an entity called Salem Blvd LLC, which reporting has tied to a data center developer active in the township. Nobody in local government has explained, on the record, why a sitting supervisor was signing secrecy agreements with the same industry that later bought his house.

Pennsylvania has started to respond to exactly this pattern, just not at the level where it happened. A Center Square investigation this fall found that nearly half of the municipalities in the state's data center "fast track" permitting program had signed NDAs with developers, Salem Township among them. "It's a good thing so many Pennsylvania municipalities have not signed NDAs," Eric Bonds, a sociology professor at the University of Mary Washington who studies data center secrecy agreements, told the outlet, a comment that implicitly counts Salem Township among the ones that did. Gov. Josh Shapiro's Executive Order 2026-05, signed August 18th, pulled every data center project out of the state's fast-track program and barred state agencies from signing NDAs on future ones. It did nothing about the agreements townships themselves had already signed. Ashbridge's NDAs were never state business. They were Salem Township's, and the governor's order doesn't reach them.

I think that gap is the real story here, more than the $586 million or the 2 gigawatts. A land sale this large, closed and paid out to 96 people, is about as locked-in as a transaction gets. A term sheet for a power plant that won't exist until 2032 is not, and PPL says so itself. In between those two certainties sits a township where the person who signed secrecy agreements with the companies buying up his neighbors' farmland is no longer around to answer for it, and where the state's new transparency rules arrived too late and aimed too high to touch the agreements that actually mattered on the ground. Watch the final Invitium-QTS agreements, the Kentucky PSC's ruling on the gas plant, and whether Harrisburg's lawmakers manage to pass any of the bills already introduced to ban exactly the kind of local NDA that Salem Township signed twice. Those are the documents that will actually decide what Doyle Watts's old land becomes. The $586 million already answered the only question that was ever fully settled.