HARRISBURG — A Pennsylvania state senator made money from the $30 million sale of property last year to a developer building a massive, controversial data center project in Cumberland County.
A career real estate agent and chair of the state's Republican Party, Greg Rothman said he was not involved in the June 2025 sale to a data center developer. However, he confirmed that RSR Realtors — a company that his father founded and that he chairs — had, through its relationship with the property’s previous owner, “received a real estate fee for the sale of the land only.”
Real estate advisor Igal Feibush, who also represented the seller, separately said that Rothman was paid for prior work when the deal closed last year, alongside several other brokers and consultants. Feibush now serves as CEO of Pennsylvania Data Center Partners, which is overseeing the PAX-1 development.
Rothman did not respond to a question about how much he was paid, and Feibush declined to say.
The lawmaker served as a listing broker for the property, which was known as PennTerra, in 2017 when it was put up for auction, which eventually fell through.
“I have been a real estate agent with RSR Realtors for 37 years, and represented and provided various real estate services for the previous owner of PennTerra over the course of the last 20 years,” Rothman wrote in an email to Spotlight PA, noting that RSR “has never been involved with the PAX-1 project.”
Still, Rothman’s ties to the property have fueled anger among a bipartisan, grassroots group that wants to halt data center development. Stewards of Cumberland County held a town hall in June that organizers say was attended by 300 people.
“This political figure who ostensibly represents us, who has been deaf to people’s complaints about Middlesex, and has very explicitly supported legislation that would disempower communities further, has a financial stake, best we understand it — at least at some point — in the health of this project,” organizer John Werner said.
State lawmakers, including Rothman, are actively debating how to regulate data centers.
In 2025, he frequently made public comments about how Pennsylvania needed to work to attract data centers.
Less than a month after the PAX-1 sale closed, Rothman introduced a data center-friendly bill that, in its original form, would have expedited permitting and created a “regulatory sandbox” for data centers, AI, and other emerging technologies. It also would have barred local municipalities from regulating data centers more aggressively than other industries.
Rothman and others involved in the data center transaction say the legislation was unrelated to his prior involvement with the property.
Feibush said he did not discuss the bill with Rothman before it was introduced. At the time, the project had already qualified for a separate expedited permitting program from the state, and Middlesex Township had approved a critical zoning overlay for the project, though an appeal and local negotiations over other approvals are still ongoing.
Rothman said that he “will always work in the best interests of my constituents and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I believe in local control and decision making on data center proposals.”
Rothman began his career at RSR in 1989, and later served as the company's president and CEO. He works at the firm alongside several members of his family, and has continued selling real estate since being elected to the state House in 2015 and winning election to the state Senate in 2022.
Dual roles are common in Harrisburg. Pennsylvania law allows lawmakers to hold other jobs, and a 2024 analysis from the Philadelphia Inquirer found that more than half of state House and Senate members do so.
The PennTerra property
The more than 500-acre property that makes up the bulk of the land where the data center is being built had been owned since the 1980s by California-based developer Fred Kayne.
Feibush said in a phone interview that he joined Kayne as a partner on the PennTerra property in 2017. Rothman was one of the first people Feibush met after coming to Harrisburg, he said, and when the partners decided to sell the property, they hired the lawmaker to serve as the listing broker.
With Rothman as the broker, the partnership put the Middlesex property up for auction in 2017. The land was preapproved for a 1,000-home development Kayne had proposed for the property, but that plan had gone on hold during the Great Recession, according to the Central Penn Business Journal.
In marketing the property, Rothman said at the time that it offered a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for a mixed-use development in the region.
In October 2017, Rothman and Feibush announced the auction was canceled because several potential buyers were opting “to deal directly with the owners” on the complicated transaction. Another buyer entered into a purchase agreement, but that ultimately fell through.
Then, in 2023 Feibush became aware of the nationwide data center boom, he said. He got connected with PowerHouse Data Centers, a Virginia-based real estate company. Working with them as a co-developer, Feibush said a deal was made to sell the PennTerra property to the limited-liability Carlisle Development Partners, a joint venture between Pennsylvania Data Center Partners and PowerHouse.
While RSR Realtors benefited from the final sale because of its early work on the property, Rothman had nothing to do with making the transaction happen or working out details, he and Feibush emphasized.
“That’s what investors want”
One of the largest proposed data centers in the state, PAX-1 is slated to be a three-campus, $15 billion facility that is expected to deliver a capacity of 1.35 gigawatts. Blasting and other site work began this spring, and initial delivery for the first phase of the project is planned for the second quarter of 2027.
The project was one of more than a dozen championed by President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) during last summer’s Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit.
Rothman explicitly introduced his data center bill in advance of that summit, saying in a news release about the legislation that the summit would “powerfully showcase Pennsylvania’s historic opportunity to both lead and power the nation’s AI boom.”
Of the measure’s goal to give faster permitting and other benefits to AI-related projects, Rothman told Next Generation Newsroom at the time, “That's what investors want. They want to be able to deploy their capital and build what they want to build and start getting a return on their investment. Time is money.”
Though the original bill would have also banned local municipalities from enacting zoning ordinances that place harsher restrictions on data center developments than other industrial projects, co-sponsor state Sen. Tracy Pennycuick (R., Montgomery) later amended it to remove that provision, as well as language surrounding expedited permitting.
The measure hasn’t otherwise moved since Rothman and Pennycuick introduced it.
Rothman’s recent legislative record isn’t uniformly sympathetic to data centers. Late last month, he voted for a bill that would eliminate a major data center sales tax exemption; the bill would also expand a tax credit that funds private school scholarships and eliminate a 5.9% state tax on the sale of electricity.
Feibush and other individuals associated with the PAX-1 project, including general counsel Andrew Giorgione and local real estate attorney Charles Courtney, have contributed money to Rothman’s campaign fund in recent years, according to public filings.
That financial support, Feibush said, should be seen as a reflection of Rothman’s popularity and personal friendships between individuals involved in the project and the senator.
“Contributions to my campaign are publicly disclosed, in compliance with all state laws and do not influence my legislative decisions,” Rothman wrote in an email.
Pennsylvania Data Center Partners is currently exploring an additional campus in Cumberland County. According to a letter sent by Giorgione to the Monroe Township Board of Supervisors, the developers have acquired two properties in the township. Rothman was not involved in either of those transactions, his chief of staff said.
Werner, the Cumberland County anti-data-center organizer, said this issue is ultimately bigger than Rothman and any sympathies the lawmaker might have toward developers.
“Rothman is a useful device because Rothman is a large-scale real estate developer who has been incredibly supportive of data center development,” Werner said.
“But in another crucial sense,” he added, “Rothman really doesn’t matter and is pretty inconsequential because, given how things are and the lay of the land being what it is, we do still have to fight these things at every municipal level.”