Pax Silica: Much Ado About Nothing

I first heard about Pax Silica a few months ago, from a video of Joshua Bingcang, president of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), clearly proud to tell everyone about the deal. He went on a media circuit after that. In June he said more than 50 companies, “including trillion-dollar tech titans,” wanted in, and that one was already in advanced due diligence as the first tenant. And what does media do with a proud announcement? They talk about it, it gets bigger and bigger, and it becomes a target, especially once politics gets hold of it, from both sides.

Three months later, there is still nothing. As of September 2026, Pax Silica is a broad plan for 1,620 hectares of New Clark City in Tarlac. Not one confirmed investment, not one confirmed tenant, and no clear picture of what will actually be built there. And yet everyone is fighting about it.

Nobody owned the story

When you announce something big and then have nothing to add, other people fill the silence for you. Business groups backed it, and so does the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The opposition questions it, and militant groups have taken it up to push for government accountability, which I’m not against, since that’s partly what I do on this website. Then the influencers came in, and now the headlines are about water, displacement, and jobs. Everyone got to tell the story of Pax Silica except the people who announced it.

About two months ago, people were up in arms: “We don’t even have proper water or enough electricity, and this thing is going to eat up both.” AI data centres need a lot of water, and anyone who used AI to make a 1980s version of themselves got the same reply online: why are you doing that, you don’t even have water. But nobody had confirmed an AI data centre in New Clark City. As investment banker Steven Cu-Unjieng has pointed out, it’s unlikely a US company would build an AI data centre in another country at all. A data centre, yes. An AI data centre, no.

Mixed messages made it easy. BCDA’s own release called New Clark City an “AI hub.” In August, Bingcang had to go back out and say “Ang proyekto na ito ay hindi data centers”, only semiconductor and electronics manufacturing. The firm answers people were asking for also came only after the criticism: dedicated off-grid power plants, nothing drawn from the community’s water supply, and a site outside ancestral domains. Those are good answers. Given in August, they sounded like defense. Given in the first announcement, they would have been the story.

The same goes for displacement. BCDA lists residents of three barangays as Project Affected Persons, and activist groups have run with it. I think it’s been greatly exaggerated. Look at the site on Google Maps and it’s mostly empty BCDA land with a couple of houses on it. Relocating a handful of households is a normal part of building anything this size, and done right, with fair relocation and livelihood support, it shouldn’t be the story. But when you don’t show people the map, someone else describes it for them.

It’s like announcing a presidential run too early. In the Philippines, I can’t think of anyone who announced early and actually won. Jejomar Binay decided to run in 2011, a year into his vice presidency. He was the early frontrunner, then spent the run-up answering Senate Blue Ribbon hearings and finished fourth in 2016. Announce early with nothing to show and you give people a longer runway to come after you, because people always have a motive.

A semblance of a plan is not a plan

The second problem is that what was announced looks like a plan without being one. Those 50 interested companies in June became “over 30” in July, and Bingcang said BCDA couldn’t entertain any of them until the framework agreement with the US was final. That agreement was supposed to come within two months of June. It’s now targeted for November, with construction not starting until 2028. The first tenant in due diligence hasn’t been heard from since.

Then there are the numbers. BCDA says more than 130,000 jobs and $40 to $70 billion in investment at full build-out. But with no named investor and no published plan, those figures aren’t based on anything. For two months the question has been: how many jobs, exactly? Nobody can answer, because there’s nothing behind the figure. Not having an investor yet doesn’t mean you can’t have a plan, as long as it’s more than Donald Trump’s “concepts of a plan.” A rough projection with its assumptions laid out is better than presenting nothing and having everyone attack that nothing.

What owning it would have looked like

So what should the government have done? Announce it, yes, then keep quiet. Talk about it only in select forums. Give a timeline: this is what we know now, and this is when we’ll know more. Say clearly what it is and what it isn’t. There will be no AI data centres. Whoever comes in brings their own electricity and water, recycled or otherwise, and can sell power to the grid but never draw from it. Every concern people raise gets looked at, and you say so from day one. And show the projection, with the plan that produced it.

None of that needs a signed investor. It only needs someone to decide what the story is before the announcement goes out.

The noise did some good

More eyes are on Pax Silica now, and some of that scrutiny is worth keeping. I support economist Cielo Magno’s push to stop exporting raw materials and process them here instead, so we move up the value chain and sell for more. She’s right that we haven’t been good to ourselves on this, and it goes well beyond Pax Silica. I’ll write about that separately. Even Marcos has said as much. She’s also right that the taxes and the implementation have to be correct, or the companies get richer, the government collects too little, and we get stripped of our natural resources.

But none of that is being violated right now, because nothing exists yet. Stay vigilant, but you can’t say no to something that isn’t there. You’re arguing over a fictional problem, right?

In the end, other countries investing in the Philippines is good. We’re partly hurting right now because foreign investors aren’t coming in. Hot money swung to a $3.94 billion outflow by end-July, and the PSEi has been hovering around 6,000 with foreigners net selling. I appreciate civil society pointing out what the government shouldn’t do, but not to the point where people believe the project itself is bad, because it isn’t. Really, all of this hullabaloo is about nothing.