As Plymouth Township’s zoning board is set to rule on the future of the former Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill at 900 Conshohocken Road, an independent economic and fiscal impact analysis puts a hard number on what is at stake. The study, prepared by 4ward Planning Inc. for 900 Conshohocken Road LLC, finds that converting the vacant 1.95 million-square-foot dormant mill site into a data center would generate $424 million in new tax revenue over 20 years, with the majority flowing directly into Colonial School District classrooms. Blocking the project keeps that revenue at zero.
The timing matters. Plymouth Township’s office vacancy rate has climbed past 21% and is projected to top 50% as existing leases expire. Hotels along the corridor are being demolished for apartments. The Plymouth Meeting Mall sits largely empty. Four years after the pandemic drove tenants out of suburban office parks, the township’s commercial tax base has not recovered, and Colonial School District has raised property taxes in each of the past several years, including a 3.18% increase for the 2025-26 school year, to cover rising costs that district finance officials have specifically tied to special education programming and services. This project is the first opportunity in a generation to reverse that math without asking a single homeowner for another dollar.
The current site pays $182,000 a year. The proposal would pay $21.1 million a year.
The steel mill parcel employs fewer than 10 people and generates only $181,781 combined in annual property taxes across Montgomery County, Plymouth Township, Colonial School District and Montgomery County Community College, according to county assessment records cited in the study.
Redeveloped as a data center, the same parcel would generate $21,114,008 in its first stabilized year, a 116-fold increase, and would expand Plymouth Township’s total assessed tax base by roughly 32%. Over the 20-year lease term the study evaluated, the net fiscal benefit to all four taxing jurisdictions totals approximately $424 million, with zero added cost to residential taxpayers.
Construction alone would support 4,976 direct jobs a year in Montgomery County, and 7,683 total jobs, including indirect and induced employment, over the three-year build. Direct construction workers would earn an average of $131,000 annually. Regionally, across the seven-county Philadelphia area, the project would generate $6.6 billion in total economic output during construction, including $2.9 billion in direct, indirect, and induced wages and $3.9 billion in value added.
Colonial School District stands to gain the most, and needs it the most.
Colonial School District would receive $15,433,432 a year once the facility is fully operational, up from the $132,875 the district collects from the site today. That works out to roughly $2,700 per student annually, in a district that has repeatedly raised taxes in recent budget cycles, while its finance committee has flagged rising special education professional services and enrollment growth as ongoing cost pressures.
The study’s own methodology notes the project would add no residential development and no new students, meaning the district receives the full revenue increase without a corresponding rise in service costs.
That is not a hypothetical outcome. Elsewhere, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion data center campus generated enough new tax revenue that the local school board paid every vested teacher a $50,935 bonus in June 2026, up from $10,200 the year before, along with a $17,472 bonus for support staff, up from $3,323. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data center tax revenue has allowed the Board of Supervisors to cut the residential property tax rate for 10 consecutive years running, while the county nets an estimated $26 in tax revenue for every $1 spent on services those facilities require.
The trades and working families are not an afterthought.
Of the 371 permanent positions the facility would support, 316, or 85%, require no four-year degree. Seventy-one of those jobs run through the apprenticeship system and skilled-trade certification, covering the electricians, HVAC technicians, and mechanical maintenance crews who keep generators, chillers, UPS systems, breakers, and elevators running. Another 123 positions require a high school diploma plus an industry or vendor certification, and 93 more require only a high school diploma or GED. These are career-track jobs for the building trades, not entry-level turnover.
The construction phase is larger still. Over three years, the project would support 4,976 direct construction jobs a year in Montgomery County, at an average annual labor income of $131,000 per worker, one of the largest sustained construction employment programs in Pennsylvania history. Every one of those jobs, and every dollar of that payroll, depends on the zoning board’s decision.
The design meets the standard that the township has asked for.
The facility, to be located on the site of a shuttered steel mill rather than new construction on undeveloped land, is designed to generate its own on-site power, use closed-loop, low-intensity water HVAC cooling, produce no light pollution, cut projected traffic by 80% compared with alternative commercial uses for the site, and meet every applicable township noise ordinance, according to the developer.
About Discovery Data Centers
Discovery Data Centers (DDC) acquires and zones land, develops and builds buildings for hyperscale Data Center development and delivers it end-to-end. The leadership team brings 48 years of execution experience redeveloping brownfield sites across biotechnology, food distribution, tier-one operating centers, and Data Centers. Discovery Data Centers “Recycles” existing brown-field sites and buildings, expediting zoning and time to market.
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