This muni just sold for $50 million. Here’s why other golf courses could be next

Dauphin Highlands, a county-owned golf course in Harrisburg, Pa., has a lot going for it: postcard views, affordable rates, a laidback, family-friendly vibe. Ask Rick Simonic. He’s been a regular on Dauphin’s tee sheets for more than 25 years and will happily bend your ear about the handsome sightlines of the Susquehanna River that open up when Dauphin’s trees shed their leaves; the modest fee he pays for a senior membership; or the welcoming atmosphere that the course, which does about 50,000 rounds annually, fosters for golfers of all ages and abilities.

Simonic, who is now 68 and retired from his job at an electronics components company, does not have kids but he does have family ties to the course. He introduced his nieces and his nephews to the game there, and he’ll never forget the round he played at Dauphin in 2020 with his wife, Debbie, and parents. The outing was always going to be memorable because, in those challenging days of social distancing, golf was one of few activities that brought families together. But the day became an all-timer when Debbie’s tee shot on the par-3 4th hole found the bottom of the cup for her first-ever ace, which, of his many fond Dauphin memories, Simonic says he cherishes most. 

If Simonic sounds wistful when he talks about the course, that’s because Dauphin Highlands’ days appear to be numbered. In August, the Dauphin County General Authority voted to sell the course to Harrisburg I, LLC, for $45.6 million — a staggering sum, roughly 10 times the recorded value of the 228-acre plot. But Harrisburg I, owned by Dallas-based Provident Realty, isn’t a traditional golf-course buyer. It wants the ground, not the greens, as a site for a data center, part of the booming real-estate sector racing to meet the immense storage and power demands of generative artificial intelligence. As Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said recently, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”

Golf courses, increasingly, are in that path. When Dauphin County announced its intent to sell Dauphin Highlands, five other data-center builders submitted proposals, underscoring the surging appetite for large, open parcels near energy and water sources. The winning bid, county officials said, would help fund schools and human-services programs and also pay off millions in debt on the golf course — a windfall few municipalities could easily refuse. The deal isn’t final yet; Provident must still confirm that the site can deliver sufficient power. But barring a major setback, the closing date is set for Dec. 31, 2027, at which point Harrisburg-area public golfers will have one less course to play.

“It’s going to be a sad day when it happens, and it’s going to happen,” Simonic told me. “Central Pennsylvanians are pretty pragmatic, and we know how the world works. They’re going to take the bag.”

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NO MATTER HOW STRONGLY you feel about the societal benefits of golf courses, you can understand the lure of a nearly $50 million payday — and Dauphin Highlands isn’t an isolated case. As data-center development accelerates — the U.S. now has more than 5,400 of the facilities — golf properties, both operational and defunct, in at least a half-dozen states have been identified as potential sites, making courses increasingly contested frontier between recreation and the digital infrastructure powering modern life.

Pennsylvania in particular has been a hotbed for this kind of activity, driven by the state’s available land, rich natural gas reserves and significant investment in energy production. Just a 30-minute drive south of Dauphin Hills, Royal Manchester Golf Links, a daily-fee course in Mt. Wolf, was, until October, under consideration for a data center. The proposal drew such fierce opposition from residents that the Board of Supervisors shelved the course as a potential data-center site.

Another 30 minutes southwest, though, the wheels are in motion for data-center construction on the land now occupied by Briarwood Golf Club, a family-owned daily-fee course in York. That development — led by Colorado-based Viridian Partners — took a step forward in October when the West Manchester Township Board of Supervisors approved a zoning ordinance that the project would require. “In an ideal world, I would love for the family to keep that as a golf course,” Steve Harlacher, the board’s chairman, told me. “But we know they don’t want to.”

And if a sale is inevitable, Harlacher said, maybe a data center is a favorable outcome, at least in terms of minimizing disruption to the township. “Some of the other potential purchasers that have come in there are these large warehouses that would have pretty big impact,” he said. “One of them was a manufacturer that would have 300 tractor trailers a day coming in and out of that facility, not to mention all the employees and things like that.”

Harlacher is not helping to decide Briarwood’s future only through the lens of a bureaucrat — he’s also a lifelong golfer who grew up playing the course. “I have a connection,” he said. As a kid, even before he started playing golf, he and his friends would ride their bikes to Briarwood and scoop balls from a pond; by age 12, he was taking lessons there and soon enough was playing rounds with his grandfather, brother and friends.

The course is in Harlacher’s blood, which, in addition to the joy the property brings many other area golfers, is why he’d like to see at least some of the holes survive. Harlacher said on Viridian’s original pitch for the land, its plans for the data facility occupied only half the plot, so the township has asked the developers about whether preserving nine holes might be feasible. However the deal shakes out, the annual real-estate tax revenue would be a boon for the town — somewhere in the range of $6 million, Harlacher said, with $4.5 million going to the school district. 

There are, of course, other considerations to weigh should the data center become a reality, including noise pollution; the loss of green space; the amount of water required for the facility’s cooling system; and potential increases in electricity costs for the town. But as George Margetas, one of the board’s other two supervisors, told me of the offer, “It was one of those situations where it’s tough not to say yes.”

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SIMILAR DEBATES ABOUT the potential for converting golf courses into data centers have been unfolding — and, in some cases, raging — in at least five other states: Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and California.

In Hanover County, Virginia, near Richmond, a developer is seeking approval to build a data center on a 400-acre parcel that includes Hunting Hawk Golf Club, a daily-fee course that sits on the banks of the Chickahominy River. That request came in the wake of a Northern Virginia planning commission last year denying a rezoning application that would have allowed the then-owner of the defunct Westpark Golf Club in Leesburg to build a data center on the property.

The same Texas company that is seeking to acquire Dauphin Highlands also made a run at getting approvals to build a $1.3 billion data center in Indiana, on land once occupied by Brassie Golf Club, which shuttered in 2021; residents pushed back and the proposal was withdrawn. About 350 miles east, in Hubbard, Ohio, residents have been voicing their own concerns about a data-center proposal on the site of Deer Creek Golf Club, a daily-fee course where 18-hole rates start at $20. In Farmington, Minn., just south of Minneapolis, the city council late last year approved a developer’s proposal to build up to 12 data centers across 340 acres, including on the site of Fountain Valley Golf Course, which closed in 2022; a group of Farmington residents has sued the city with hopes of halting the development.

Out on the West Coast, the land that houses the defunct Delta View Golf Course in Pittsburg, Calif., north of San Francisco, has been approved for development of a technology park and data center. In 2022, the Pittsburg city council agreed to sell more than half of the municipal course’s footprint to a Delaware developer, meaning Delta View is destined to become the first ex-muni with holes designed by Alister MacKenzie — the Augusta National visionary — to be retrofitted for what Pittsburg’s mayor, Jelani Killings, said last month “will serve as a catalyst for secondary businesses such as technology suppliers, research, development and support industries that will choose to locate nearby this brand-new infrastructure.”

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HOW SERIOUS A THREAT the data-fication of golf courses poses to the game is difficult to say. For now, industry leaders are not sounding any alarm bells, but that might just be a matter of awareness.

Neither the National Golf Foundation nor the Golf Course Owners Association of America track statistics on such activity, and two data-center experts with whom I spoke said they were unaware of data-center developers taking a particular shine to golf courses. Peter Babigian, a principal at Dallas-based Trinity Consultants, which advises on data-center construction, said golf courses, at least in some regards, actually sound like unsuitable places upon which to build the facilities.

“Most of the data-center projects we get involved in are in areas with large tracts of open land,” Babigian said. “A golf course could also be a big tract of open land, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is grade. Most of the golf courses I’ve seen have a good amount of grade change in terms of hills and rises and ups and downs. So, if I can get X number of acres of open land and just do mass grading, why would I try to deal with repurposing a golf course that might have water and hazards and drainage and elevation change?”

Babigian suspected the answer to that question might lie in some courses’ proximity to energy sources. According to a 2024 report by the Brookings Institute, data centers consumed 4.4 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S., and Goldman Sachs recently reported that global power demand from data centers will increase 50 percent by 2027 and by as much as 165 percent by 2030.

“Availability of power is critical,” Babigian said. “I don’t know what the proximity from golf courses to utilities typically is, but it’s certainly an issue where data centers need a tremendous amount of power and they need a lot of water. Many of the projects we’ve been involved in are building their own substations, they’re building gas-fired utility plants, there’s a push toward nuclear sometime in the future.”

Another expert — Pat Lynch, executive managing director, global head, at CBRE Data Center Solutions, which also is based in Dallas — agreed that the “common denominator” among many data-center projects is the need for “large capacities” of power. “If you peel back the onion on these [golf course sites],” Lynch said, “my suspicion is there’s some power story that is around and very close to the golf course.”

In the case of the Pennsylvania courses, you don’t need to look far to find that story. In July, President Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., used the occasion of the inaugural Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh to announce a $90 billion-plus investment in energy and AI in Pennsylvania, an initiative that will, in part, supply energy to data centers and enhance the power grid. The Trump administration also loaned Constellation Energy Corp $1 billion to restart its nuclear reactor, on behalf of Microsoft, at the plant formerly known as Three Mile Island, which has been closed since 2019. Three Mile Island sits on the Susquehanna River, about a 30-minute drive south of Dauphin Hills and 45 minutes north of Briarwood.

When I asked Jay Karen, who is CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association, about data centers creeping in on golf courses, he said he was not familiar with the specifics of any such deals but that “it’s a phenomenon that is not surprising. These land-use cases in golf get very controversial because it’s always a ‘not in my backyard’ kind of thing that the local residents hate to see the green space go away. But in the end, these are small businesses that have the ability to exercise an exit strategy.

“These golf courses might only be worth three or four or five million dollars as golf courses, but when someone’s dangling a $20 million or $40 million check, it’s economics at work, right?”

Karen sees a downside to this niche of capitalism, too, namely when low-fee courses like Dauphin Hills go away. He said he has “deep concern” about the supply line of affordable daily-fee golf in the U.S., because many developers have deserted that model for high-end courses that are out of reach for much of the population; meanwhile, other developers are seeking to repurpose financially challenged courses for housing developments, industrial complexes and, yes, more recently, data centers.  

“It’s sad for golf,” Karen said of course sales and closures. “Like, golf looks at this and sees a course close and there’s sadness around it, which is a very valid feeling, because there’s something about our game people want to keep golf courses around. They want their friends and family and other people to experience it. When a golf course closes, that’s one less chance for people to play golf. The golfers get it.”

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WAYNE FLEMING ISN’T an avid golfer, but he lives in a neighborhood across the street from Dauphin Highlands, occasionally plays the course and has a deep appreciation for the green space that it provides. 

When asked about the benefit of living near the course, Fleming, who is 63 and a public health employee, told me, “It’s not a park but it’s the next best thing.” Dauphin Highlands also has sentimental value to Fleming. Before the property became a golf course, it was a corporate retreat for Bethlehem Steel and a popular spot for wedding receptions; Fleming celebrated his nuptials there in 1987. 

Fleming contends that a shuttered steel mill around the corner from the course would be a more logical data-center site, but he’s not holding out hope, calling the repurposing of Dauphin Highlands a “fait accompli.” Should the data center become a reality, Fleming worries about the resulting noise pollution as well as losing some of the leafy views he enjoys when he pulls out of his development. He’s also convinced that the facility would not occupy the entire footprint of the course, which could, he speculated, entice the new owners to build more than just a data center on the land.

“Once they own that piece of property, it’s going to be whatever they want that they can push through,” he said. “What happens when they say we want to put a trucking outfit there or we want to put some office buildings in? That is what I’m most concerned about.” (Those questions are best suited for the board members of the Dauphin County General Authority, all of whom declined to be interviewed for this story.)

When Fleming posited that the land the developers would require to build a data center would be far less than the acreage of the golf course, I told him about the potential sale of Briarwood Golf Club and the idea the town’s Board of Supervisors’ chairman had about finding a happy medium of building a data center while also preserving nine holes.

Fleming said he had never considered that option for Dauphin Highlands but that trying to hold on to some of the course is “a great idea.”

Rick Simonic, though, says Dauphin’s regulars aren’t especially optimistic about the course’s prospects for survival and have already been discussing where to take their weekly league matches.

“You can’t fight city hall is kind of how our guys look at it,” Simonic said. “There are other courses in the area; it’s just we’ll lose one of the better ones. We’re kind of resigned to our fate.”

The author welcomes your comments at alan.bastable@golf.com.