Ninety-six families in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania have collectively sold roughly 1,700 acres of farmland to QTS — a data center developer owned by private equity giant Blackstone — for $586 million, an average of $330,000 per acre. Pennsylvania farm real estate averaged just $9,560 an acre in 2025 according to USDA NASS. The premium works out to roughly 35 times the land's value as farmland — because the buyer isn't paying for soil, it's paying for a spot next to one of the largest nuclear power plants in the country.
2026 Update: A Developing Story
- March 2026: QTS acquires approximately 1,700 acres in Salem Township via a holding company, Salem Township Holdings LLC, for more than $500 million, per Luzerne County property records reviewed by local press (Citizens' Voice).
- July 2026: The Wall Street Journal reports the completed deal's total value at $586 million across 96 sellers — an average of $5.5 million per family. One family, Marilee and David Kiliti, sold their 89-acre hog farm for more than $22 million.
- July 2026 (developing, not yet finalized): A second, larger assemblage of roughly 200 landowners in the same area is reportedly being organized for a combined $1.3 billion — no public filing confirms this figure as of this writing; treat it as an illustrative, reported estimate.
Land Values: Farm vs. Data Center Premium
| Benchmark | Value per Acre | Notable Development |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. farm real estate average (2025, USDA NASS) | $4,350 | National benchmark, up 4.3% YoY |
| Pennsylvania farm real estate average (2025, USDA NASS) | $9,560 | State average across all farm real estate |
| Salem Township, PA data center land deal (2026) | $330,000 | ~35x Pennsylvania's farm average; paid by QTS/Blackstone |
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The Power Behind the Price
The Salem Township farmland became so valuable because of what sits next door: Talen Energy's Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a two-unit nuclear plant with roughly 2,500 megawatts of nameplate capacity. In 2024, Talen sold an adjacent 1,200-acre developed data center campus to Amazon Web Services for $650 million, and in 2025 the companies expanded their power purchase agreement through 2042, ramping toward 1,920 megawatts.
The contrast is worth pausing on. In 2024, $650 million bought a built campus with a direct nuclear interconnect. Two years later, $586 million bought raw farmland across the road — a sign of how fast AI-driven land demand has compressed the price gap between finished infrastructure and empty fields. The Salem Township parcels also sit inside a township overlay zone that permits data centers by right, removing zoning risk as a variable.
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Who Assembled the Deal
Jack Sordoni, a Luzerne County native who spent his career assembling oil-and-gas land packages, is reported to have spent roughly two years persuading dozens of individual families to sell as a single contiguous block rather than negotiating separately. His firm, 4-3 Consulting, earned a brokerage fee for the assemblage.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, one of the sellers, Marilee Kiliti, described the years before the sale as financially difficult. She told the paper of an earlier failed attempt to expand the family's hog farm: "It was a terrible time — I didn't even want to go into the nearby town because everyone was staring at me." (Attribution: Wall Street Journal reporting.)
A Different Deal Than the Shale Boom
It's worth contrasting this with Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale gas boom of the 2000s and 2010s, where landowners typically kept their land and received ongoing royalty payments tied to production. In the Salem Township data center deal, families sold the land outright for a lump sum — they will not share in any future lease revenue QTS collects from data center tenants.
For readers doing their own math: land is a small fraction of a data center's total project cost. Industry estimates put electrical systems alone at 40–45% of a build budget, which is part of why developers can pay such large premiums for the right site.
Not Everyone Is Celebrating
Residents in nearby Mifflinville are reportedly opposing a similarly proposed campus, and homeowners left out of the Salem Township assemblage now face being surrounded by construction without having received a payout.
The pushback fits a broader national trend: polling has found a majority of Americans say they don't want a large data center built near them, and some states have begun reconsidering the tax incentives that drew these projects in the first place.
What Happens Next
The reported second assemblage — roughly 200 landowners for roughly $1.3 billion, still unconfirmed — is the next data point to watch in this market. If it closes near the reported figure, it would suggest the Salem Township premium wasn't a one-off but a repeatable price point wherever a data center developer needs contiguous, power-adjacent land with permitting already cleared.
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