Corscale Commits $10.5 Billion to Five Harrisburg-Area Data Centers

Corscale Data Centers said it would spend $10.5 billion on two data-center complexes in Swatara Township, Pennsylvania. The filings describe five buildings totaling 1,972,764 square feet, rooftop chillers, two substations and a public-grid power connection. For now, those filings are the most detailed public description of the planned campuses.

One caveat belongs up front. The reviewed material does not name a facility capacity, a construction date, a water figure or a job count. This analysis treats every one of those gaps as unknown.

What does the $10.5 billion buy?

The developer proposes two complexes: Highlands East and Highlands West. Highlands West would occupy the former Dauphin Highlands Golf Course with three one-story buildings of 409,500 square feet each. Highlands East sits behind WITF at 4951 Highland St. and includes two buildings of 372,132 square feet each.

Item	Confirmed detail
Developer	Corscale Data Centers
Location	Swatara Township, Pennsylvania
Stated spending	$10.5 billion across two complexes
Highlands West site	Former Dauphin Highlands Golf Course
Highlands West buildings	Three, each 409,500 sq ft, one story
Highlands East site	Behind WITF, 4951 Highland St.
Highlands East buildings	Two, each 372,132 sq ft
Power source	Public grid

The reported figure is a single combined number. The reporting does not split it between the two complexes, and it does not break out spending on buildings, electrical infrastructure or computing hardware.

Simple division gives a sense of scale, with a warning attached. Spread over roughly 1.97 million square feet, $10.5 billion works out to about $5,300 per square foot. That is an illustrative ratio, not a reported cost. Real spending could include land, utility work and equipment outside the building footprint.

The ratio still explains the pitch. A conventional warehouse shell is cheap per square foot; a data center is a power plant interface, a cooling plant and a network hub wearing a warehouse's outline.

How would Highlands West be built?

The plan calls for three one-story buildings, two substations, a PPL Public Utility switch station, three chiller yards and four stormwater basins. That list reads like a small industrial campus. It is one.

The chiller yards keep the heaviest mechanical plant away from the server halls. The four stormwater basins exist because a campus with that much roof and pavement sheds a lot of rain, and the basins hold and release runoff gradually. The substations and switch station show the campus would step power down from the transmission side through utility-owned and developer-owned equipment before it reaches the buildings. The reporting does not state voltage levels, megawatt ratings or in-service dates.

Highlands West alone covers 1,228,500 square feet of building floor. Each Highlands East building stands about 10% smaller than its western counterpart, at 372,132 square feet. Together the East buildings add 744,264 square feet. The East buildings would stand 35 feet high with an additional 15 feet of accessories, putting the tallest point near 50 feet; the reporting does not specify which equipment makes up that extra 15 feet.

What did Corscale say about cooling?

Erik Draaisma, executive vice president of business development for Corscale Data Centers, said the two Highland Street buildings would use a closed-loop system. A closed loop circulates the same cooling fluid between the equipment and the chillers instead of continuously drawing in fresh water and discharging it.

The plans place chillers on the roofs. Rooftop placement keeps floor space for computers, shortens pipe runs to the heat exchangers and isolates vibration and noise from the white space (the server halls themselves).

A closed loop can cut water consumption compared with designs that evaporate water continuously. It does not remove the electricity bill, because chillers and pumps still draw power. Residents who worry about local resources will want actual consumption figures, which the project has not published.

What does the existing XO facility show?

The XO Communications data center at 991 Peiffers Lane, ZIP 17109, shows the other end of the Harrisburg spectrum. Its listing describes 4 kW per cabinet, or 160 watts per square foot of power density, two UPS (uninterruptible power supply) battery strings providing 9 minutes of backup at full load, and N+1 redundant air-cooled precision cooling, meaning one more cooling unit than the load requires.

Those numbers translate easily. Four kilowatts per cabinet at 160 watts per square foot implies roughly 25 square feet of floor per cabinet, including aisles and support space. Nine minutes of battery, or 540 seconds, is enough for generators to start and take over. The listing does not date the facility's last upgrade or confirm the figures are current, so read them as design intent, not a live spec sheet.

The comparison is not a fair fight, and that is the point. One is a colocation suite on a building's first floor. The other is a purpose-built campus with its own substations. A back-of-envelope exercise shows the gap: 1.97 million square feet at 160 watts per square foot would draw near 316 megawatts. That arithmetic is illustrative only, since Corscale has published no capacity figure.

What questions remain open?

Several unanswered questions will decide how the plans play out. The reporting addresses none of them.

• How many megawatts will each complex draw, and when would PPL energize the switch station?
• How much water will the closed-loop systems consume?
• What noise levels will rooftop chillers and chiller yards produce at the property line?
• What backup generation, if any, will sit on site, and under what air permits?
• What happens to the golf course land after it closes for good?

Each question has an engineering answer and a political one. Township boards, utilities and residents will weigh both in public meetings. Developers who publish clear numbers early tend to meet less resistance than those who wait.

The confirmed details point to a very large build with closed-loop cooling and a grid-fed power plan. The most important numbers, including megawatt capacity and water use, remain unpublished, and any figure seen for these sites before Corscale or PPL releases one is an estimate rather than a fact.