Ninety-six landowners in Salem Township, Pennsylvania sold about 1,700 acres to data center developer QTS for 586 million dollars, with individual sellers receiving anywhere from around 1 million to more than 35 million dollars.

Two years before the deal closed, an acre of land in this part of Luzerne County was worth less than $5,000(CBS). When the paperwork was signed in March 2026, QTS had paid an average of roughly $330,000 an acre across about 1,700 acres according to propmodo.com. That is a 66-fold jump on the same dirt in the space of two farming seasons, and it explains most of what happened next in a rural township of about 4,000 people.

The details are unusual enough to walk through carefully. Ninety-six landowners, one buyer, one price. How does a deal like this come together, and what does a place look like the morning after?

Why was this particular land worth so much?

Not the soil. The value came from location. The land sits next to Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear plant, a roughly 2,500-megawatt station, with high-voltage power lines already running through it. Local zoning also allows data centers there by default. And data centers are, above almost everything else, a bet on power. Land beside a large nuclear plant with the wiring already in place is close to the ideal address for one.

There was a neighbor precedent, too. As reported by timesleader.com, in March 2024, Amazon paid Talen Energy $650 million for a neighboring data center campus. Once one big buyer plants a flag next to the plant, the surrounding acreage stops looking like farmland to the market and starts looking like the site of the next campus. QTS, a developer owned by Blackstone, bought the assembled land through a holding company called Salem Township Holdings LLC and is expected to build between 12 and 17 data centers on it.

The premium is easier to feel with one comparison. That $330,000-an-acre average is about 35 times Pennsylvania’s 2025 average farm value of $9,560 an acre. And these were outright sales, not leases that keep paying. The families got a number and walked.

How do 96 owners land on one price without a holdout?

This is the mechanically interesting part. A buyer who needs 1,700 connected acres normally faces a classic problem. The last owner to sell knows the whole deal collapses without them, so they hold out for a fortune. Enough holdouts and nothing gets built. Buying this much land parcel by parcel, quietly, usually fails.

Salem Township went the other way. The sellers organized as a bloc first, then sold as one. The deal was put together by Jack Sordoni and his firm 4-3 Consulting. Michael Hodgson, a resident who sold a 14-acre property, described the group to the Times Leader as being “in this together, lockstep.” That is one seller’s account of the mood, not proof that all 96 families agreed on everything. But the structure did the work: bargaining together removes any single owner’s holdout leverage, because no one is the last domino.

Sordoni frames it as more than a tactic. As reported by the Times Leader, he said “This is the right way to do data centers. It’s the only way to do data centers.” That is the view of the person who organized the deal and profited from it, not a neutral verdict. What is fair to say is that bargaining together gave the sellers leverage they would not have had one at a time.

What does it mean to get $1 million in the same deal as $35 million?

The amounts families received ran from around $1 million to more than $35 million, tracking roughly with how much land each owned. The average worked out to about $5.5 million per family. The same signing brought one household a life-changing million and another something closer to a lottery win.

The specific stories put faces on those numbers. David Kiliti and his wife Marilee sold an 89-acre farm for more than $22 million. Hodgson, a 38-year-old construction worker, sold his 14 acres for nearly 60 times what he paid for it in 2019. These were not investors who saw the wave coming. They were people who happened to own the right dirt at the right moment.

How they feel about it varies, and their own words are worth hearing. Hodgson was blunt about the outside view. “It’s easy to look from the outside looking in and say ‘Oh, these guys are sellouts,'” he told CBS News, “but, I mean, who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity, you know, to create generational wealth?” Kiliti went further, predicting a spillover. “For years, the town’s been run down. This helps a lot of people, not just the people that got the money,” he said. That is a beneficiary’s hope for what the money will do, not a settled fact about how the town will fare.

What does Salem Township become now?

National sentiment is not on the project’s side. A 2026 Gallup poll found that about seven in 10 Americans oppose building an AI data center in their local area. Salem Township is now the place where that abstract objection meets a very concrete pile of money.

The people involved know the ground has shifted. Sordoni framed the sale as a stand against decline, telling CBS, “We’re tired of watching things leave Salem Township.” He also said about 80% of the families who sold plan to stay local. Even Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, struck a cautious note. “I showed up in communities and heard the concerns of neighbors,” he told CBS. “I don’t want things that the community is not going to want in their backyards.”

The one question nobody can answer yet is the one that matters most to the roughly 4,000 people who live there. A township whose farmland just became a dozen or more industrial buildings, whose neighbors are now newly and unevenly wealthy, and whose skyline will soon be power lines and server halls next to a nuclear plant, is a different township. Whether it becomes the revival Kiliti hopes for, or the kind of place the Gallup majority fears, will not be settled by the size of the check. It will be settled by what gets built, who stays, and how the place feels once the construction crews arrive.