The Falls Township Board of Supervisors has approved a nondisclosure agreement for a proposed data center project at the Keystone Trade Center in Morrisville, just outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.
As reported by Levittown Now, the request for a nondisclosure agreement came from the potential tenant at the site, not the property owner NorthPoint Development.
The NDA will not prevent anybody from filing a right-to-know request or from obtaining information about the proposed development.
Michael Clarke, township solicitor, said: “Essentially what this agreement says is if we get a right-to-know request, we’ll notify them. And, anything we have to do to defend it, NorthPoint will pick up the cost and we will be very careful with proprietary information.”
The project has been approved for rezoning at the zoning hearing last week. It is set to become a one-million-square-foot (92,905 sqm) facility used by the tenant as a data center.
The building is already constructed and now just needs to be outfitted as a large data center.
NorthPoint first acquired the property in 2020 for $160 million. The developer has plans to build a major hub for e-commerce and logistics, with a project investment of $1.5 billion.
As part of the development’s incentive package, the relevant authorities in the region designated the site as a Keystone Opportunity Investment Zone from January 2021 to December 2035. The designations provide NorthPoint with significant tax breaks.
NDAs are not uncommon for private businesses, are often used by large data center providers when dealing with local government. AWS has been known to use NDAs as the tech giant explored development in neighboring counties.
The majority of data centers in Pennsylvania are concentrated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Philadelphia is currently home to operators including Flexential, DataBank, Equinix, H5, ColoHouse, and Lumen.
