Quantm Group LLC has filed a conditional use application with Covington Township, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, proposing a hyperscale campus called Project Gold that would consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity across nearly 1,000 acres straddling Interstate 380. The filing was first reported by The Times-Tribune (Scranton), with a related legal dispute covered in a second Times-Tribune piece.

On August 19, 2026, Quantm Group submitted a 4,000-plus-page conditional use application to Covington Township. The application covers facilities split across two campuses, the Northwest Campus and the Southeast Campus, separated by I-380, with uses spanning both Covington and Clifton townships.

The application sits in a data center and energy technology zoning district where these uses are conditionally allowed, subject to hearings and a vote by township supervisors. No final approval has been recorded as of August 21, 2026.

Quantm Group LLC is an Ardmore, Pennsylvania-based developer led by principal and co-founder Tony Maras, an attorney. The firm is not a household name in hyperscale circles, but the scale of Project Gold places it alongside the largest single-campus proposals in the United States. Notably, Quantm has already substantially revised its plans: earlier concepts included up to 1,000 backup generators, a possible nuclear reactor, and roughly 1 million gallons per day of water demand. The current application eliminates the generator array and nuclear concept and reduces water demand to just over 8,500 gallons per day, signaling that the team is actively engineering toward approvability rather than holding a static proposal.

PPL Electric Utilities owning the two switchyards is the single most important infrastructure detail in this filing for staffing purposes. Utility ownership typically means the substation work falls under utility labor agreements and procurement channels, not the developer's general contractor. That matters because it separates the high-voltage substation scope from the broader campus construction scope, creating two distinct hiring tracks with different contracting structures, union affiliations, and skill requirements. Firms sourcing construction labor for Project Gold will need to account for that boundary early.

The 900 MW battery storage yard adds another specialized scope that does not overlap cleanly with either the building trades constructing the data center shells or the utility crews building the switchyards. Battery storage commissioning is a niche skill set with its own certification and safety requirements.

Lackawanna County sits in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre region, a historically industrial area with a genuine depth of construction and trades workers shaped by coal, rail, and manufacturing, and more recently by logistics and warehousing along the I-81/I-380 corridor. That foundation suits the civil, structural, and general construction phases of a campus this size. The constraint is not the building trades broadly. It is high-voltage electrical specialists and substation-capable crews. With Project Gold's two PPL switchyards, a 900 MW battery storage yard, and at least two other large data center or energy proposals active in the county at the same time, the regional market for linemen, high-voltage electricians, protection and controls technicians, and substation-capable project managers will be competed for by multiple projects drawing from the same limited pool.

Operations and commissioning roles add a second pressure point. Commissioning engineers on hyperscale campuses of this scale typically earn in the range of $147,000 annually, and critical facilities engineers command $117,000 to $147,000. Those roles are rarely filled locally in a market without an existing hyperscale cluster. Scranton's hospitals, universities, and logistics operations compete for adjacent technical talent, but they do not produce the specific data center operations background these roles require. Expect out-of-region sourcing to be necessary for commissioning and early operations staffing from the moment construction milestones begin triggering hire dates.

For a full breakdown of roles, pay bands, and where the talent is, see our guide to hiring data center talent in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. Sources: The Times-Tribune (Scranton), which first reported the Project Gold conditional use filing, and The Times-Tribune (Scranton) on the related legal dispute affecting the Clifton Township portion of the site.