Western Pennsylvania is becoming a test bed for one of the most consequential changes underway in data center development: the migration from simply finding grid capacity to building the power supply along with the data center.

Two projects illustrate that transition particularly well. Aligned Data Centers is advancing the roughly $10 billion, 2-GW Project Phoenix campus at the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power station site in Shippingport, Beaver County. About 60 miles to the east, the former Homer City Generating Station is being transformed into the Homer City Energy Campus, centered on as much as 4.4 GW of new natural-gas generation and a proposed Amazon Web Services campus that could ultimately include 39 data center buildings.

The projects share a number of similarities. Both reuse former coal-generation properties. Both already possess much of the infrastructure that greenfield data center developers spend years trying to obtain: high-voltage transmission, industrial zoning, water infrastructure, pipeline access, large parcels and proximity to the Marcellus and Utica natural-gas fields.But technically and commercially, they are also very different.

Project Phoenix is essentially a data-center-led development using behind-the-meter generation, supplemented by a separate plan to repower the former coal station. While Homer City is the reverse: a power-generation project being constructed first, with the hyperscale data center development forming around the available power supply.

This isn’t a competition, but it is a comparison on speed of delivery and the issues both development models face.

Project Phoenix: Aligned Moves Into Pennsylvania

Aligned calls Shippingport its first Pennsylvania campus and a regional flagship. The company formally broke ground on Project Phoenix on September 10, 2026, describing it as a 2-GW campus spanning three data center facilities and representing roughly $10 billion in regional investment. Aligned estimates the development will support approximately 3,000 construction jobs and 640 full-time jobs in ongoing campus operations.

The site is adjacent to the former Bruce Mansfield Power Plant, once one of Pennsylvania's largest coal facilities. Aligned reportedly completed its acquisition in July 2026 of approximately 650.9 acres for about $223 million. The planned development has been described in local planning documents and reporting as encompassing as many as three data center buildings totaling nearly 2 million square feet.

Shippingport Borough approved Aligned's conditional-use application on March 31, 2026, subject to conditions incorporated in the borough's written decision. The approval moved Project Phoenix through one of its most important local entitlement hurdles.

A Behind-the-Meter Data Center Rather Than Another Giant Grid Request

Aligned now says Project Phoenix will use its own dedicated onsite power source rather than the local electrical grid. That distinction goes directly to one of the project’s central selling points: the campus is being designed around power developed with the data center rather than around a multi-gigawatt utility request moving through an already constrained transmission and generation environment.

Aligned intends to use natural-gas-fed fuel-cell generation at the campus. The company says the arrangement will allow the facilities to operate without imposing additional infrastructure costs or instability on the surrounding electric grid.

Aligned’s September groundbreaking announcement resolves part of the earlier uncertainty around Project Phoenix’s scale: the company now describes it as a 2-GW, three-facility campus. That figure should still be distinguished from the separate multi-gigawatt generation projects associated with the broader Shippingport Industrial Park, including Frontier Group’s proposed 2.55-GW repowering of the former Bruce Mansfield plant. Aligned has not characterized the 2-GW campus figure specifically as critical IT load, so the numbers should not be treated as interchangeable.

The clearest evidence of the scale of the gas infrastructure supporting the behind-the-meter Aligned component instead comes from the natural-gas infrastructure being constructed to serve the site. National Fuel Gas disclosed that its new Shippingport Lateral will provide approximately 205,000 dekatherms per day of firm gas transportation capacity to the Shippingport development, specifically identifying demand associated with a behind-the-meter data center.

The roughly 7.5-mile pipeline entered construction in March 2026 and is targeted for service late in 2026. National Fuel says the developer contracted for 100% of the lateral's capacity under a long-term agreement. That is not a speculative request for future pipeline capacity. It represents physical enabling infrastructure now being constructed specifically for the Shippingport power strategy.

Fuel Cells Change the Traditional Data Center Power Model

Natural-gas fuel cells differ from the reciprocating engines and gas turbines increasingly appearing at AI campuses because they generate electricity electrochemically rather than through combustion and mechanical generation. Depending on the technology and configuration, that can provide high efficiency, modular deployment and substantially lower emissions of conventional combustion pollutants such as nitrogen oxides. For data centers, modularity also creates a scheduling advantage: generation can potentially be added in blocks alongside successive phases of IT capacity.

They are not, however, zero-carbon. A system operating on natural gas still results in carbon emissions, and its overall climate impact also depends on methane leakage throughout the gas supply chain. Aligned's characterization of the technology as exceptionally low-polluting includes the understanding that this is not a carbon-free alternative.

Aligned has also not publicly identified several important technical details: the fuel-cell supplier, specific fuel-cell technology, total installed generating capacity, the electrical topology connecting generation to individual buildings, or the amount of grid capacity retained for supplemental or emergency operation. Those disclosures will be important for understanding exactly how "grid independent" Project Phoenix will be in practice.

What Happens to the Old Bruce Mansfield Generators?

Aligned’s Project Phoenix is only half of the Shippingport story. Frontier Group, which acquired the former Bruce Mansfield assets in 2022 and has been redeveloping the broader property as the Shippingport Industrial Park, is separately pursuing the Shippingport Power Station project.

Its plan calls for repurposing major portions of the old coal plant rather than simply demolishing the generating infrastructure. Frontier proposes refurbishing three existing GE steam turbine-generator sets and modifying the former coal-fired boilers to operate on natural gas. The company lists planned output of approximately 2,550 MW, with three roughly 850-MW generating units. Existing 345-kV transmission infrastructure would be reused to reconnect the plant to PJM. The value of the existing transmission infrastructure can’t be overstated. This is part of the infrastructure development that generally delays the connection of new generation sources to the grid.

This unusual approach involves the conversion to new natural-gas burners, boiler modifications, controls upgrades and refurbishment of the turbines, generators, cooling towers, transformers and other balance-of-plant equipment.

Most coal-to-gas projects either replace the original boilers with new combined-cycle gas turbines or retire the old steam-generation system entirely. Shippingport instead proposes retaining a substantial portion of the original steam plant and converting the heat source from coal to natural gas.

Frontier puts the direct investment in the generating project at approximately $1.6 billion and currently targets power delivery around late 2028 or early 2029.

This means Shippingport could eventually contain two fundamentally different natural-gas power systems. The first is distributed, behind-the-meter generation serving Aligned's data centers. The second is a massive central generating station using repowered legacy equipment and reconnecting to PJM. These two projects occupy the same broader industrial ecosystem, benefit from some of the same pipeline and electrical infrastructure, and could eventually interact commercially.

The Gas Infrastructure Is Being Built in Layers

National Fuel's expansion plans reinforce that distinction. Beyond the approximately 205,000 Dth/day Shippingport Lateral associated with the behind-the-meter data center development, National Fuel is planning its larger Line N System Upgrade, which is expected to add approximately 294,000 Dth/day of transportation capacity. About 200,000 Dth/day of that expansion is targeted toward the Shippingport Industrial Park.

National Fuel has said total potential gas demand around the redevelopment could eventually approach 800,000 Dth/day when the behind-the-meter data center generation and full coal-to-gas power station conversion are considered together.

Aligned does not necessarily have to wait until the 2.55-GW Shippingport Power Station is operating in 2028 or 2029 to begin powering data center capacity. The dedicated lateral and behind-the-meter generation potentially provide an earlier path to energization.

That is arguably the key strategic advantage of Project Phoenix: Aligned potentially does not have to wait for the larger Shippingport Power Station to enter service before energizing data center capacity. At the same time, the wider natural-gas buildout extends beyond the data center campus itself, supporting the broader Shippingport Industrial Park and the proposed repowering of the former coal plant.

Cooling Is the Other Infrastructure Differentiator

Aligned has also made water consumption a central element of the Phoenix design. The company now says each of the three data centers is engineered to require zero water for operational cooling, using a closed-loop system that continuously recycles deionized water. Aligned says the resulting overall water footprint will be comparable to that of a standard commercial office building.  

The approach still requires water for initial fill and normal facility uses, and the comparison is Aligned’s own rather than an independently verified operating measurement. But if realized at the announced scale, the design would substantially reduce one of the most politically sensitive resource demands associated with large AI campuses.

Aligned Has Substantial Financial Backing

In July, a consortium including Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, MGX and BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners completed the acquisition of Aligned at an enterprise value of approximately $40 billion. Aligned said the transaction included commitments for another $5 billion of growth capital. At the time, its portfolio included 51 campuses and more than 6.4 GW of operational and planned capacity.

Aligned is not attempting to finance Project Phoenix as an isolated Pennsylvania startup project. It is part of a heavily capitalized international data center platform with direct access to institutional infrastructure and AI investment capital. The major unanswered questions are customer and schedule related. Aligned has not publicly named Project Phoenix's anchor tenant. Nor has it publicly disclosed the campus's ultimate IT load or a detailed phase-by-phase construction schedule.

As of late September, Project Phoenix has secured land and local land-use approval, begun construction of enabling gas infrastructure and held its formal groundbreaking. Public evidence of full-scale vertical data center construction remains less developed, however, than the construction record at Homer City.

Pennsylvania’s regulatory environment has also tightened. On August 18, Gov. Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05, removing data center projects from the state’s Permit Fast Track program and directing DEP to incorporate the state’s Responsible Infrastructure Development, or GRID, requirements into its review of new data center permit applications.

The order also makes local approvals a more consequential prerequisite in the state permitting process and ties development more directly to requirements covering energy affordability, environmental protection, transparency, workforce development and community engagement.

Homer City: Build the Power Plant and Bring the Data Centers to It

If Shippingport starts with a data center developer solving its own power problem, Homer City starts with the power plant itself. The original Homer City Generating Station permanently ceased coal generation in 2023. Its successor, Homer City Redevelopment, is converting the more than 3,200-acre property into the Homer City Energy Campus.

DCF has tracked Homer City’s transformation from a retired coal-generation site into a power-and-data infrastructure campus since the redevelopment strategy first began taking shape. At its center is what the developer describes as up to 4.4 GW of new natural-gas generation, making it one of the largest gas-fired generation projects under development anywhere in the United States. Early announcements rounded the figure to approximately 4.5 GW.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection permit documents provide an even more detailed look at the architecture; Homer City is permitted for seven GE Vernova 7HA.02 combined-cycle gas turbine trains, supplemented by ten Mitsubishi Power FT8 MOBILEPAC aeroderivative simple-cycle turbines. DEP describes the overall project's purpose as providing approximately 4,678 MWe of dispatchable generation.

Seven Combined-Cycle Plants Form the Backbone

GE Vernova's 7HA.02 is one of the company's largest H-class gas turbines. In combined-cycle operation, each gas turbine generates electricity directly and then sends its extremely hot exhaust into a heat-recovery steam generator. Instead of discarding that thermal energy, the HRSG produces steam that drives a steam turbine, producing additional electricity without proportionately increasing fuel consumption.

The permit application describes each 1x1 7HA.02 train as producing approximately 525 MW net without duct firing and roughly 633 MW when additional fuel is burned in the HRSG.

Combined-cycle generation can be economically attractive for hyperscale AI campuses because they create extremely large, high-utilization electrical demand. But high utilization should not be confused with a steady load profile. Coordinated AI training workloads can produce rapid, repetitive swings in demand as large groups of accelerators ramp together, creating power-quality and grid-stability challenges alongside the sheer need for megawatts.

That makes the ten Mitsubishi FT8 MOBILEPAC units particularly interesting. Each is a relatively small aeroderivative gas turbine with output around 25 MW and can respond far more quickly than the large combined-cycle blocks.

The permit does not assign a specific commercial role to the FT8 fleet, but technically the units provide a fast-start layer capable of supporting plant startup, contingency response, peaking or rapid load changes. These are all issues that matter when the intended customer is a multi-gigawatt data center campus.

A central issue with dedicated power generation for AI is not simply producing enough megawatts. The system must maintain power quality and ride through generator trips, maintenance periods and sudden changes in IT demand.

The presence of both large, efficient combined-cycle blocks and smaller fast-response generation gives Homer City more operational flexibility than an architecture based solely on enormous baseload units.

EQT is Building the Fuel Strategy Around Appalachian Gas

Homer City's gas requirements are themselves on a data-center scale. EQT Corporation has reached an agreement in principle to serve as the exclusive supplier and sourcing partner for the facility, with potential deliveries of as much as 665,000 MMBtu of gas per day.

The proposed supply architecture uses both the Texas Eastern Transmission system and Eastern Gas Transmission & Storage network, giving Homer City access to more than one interstate pipeline route. That redundancy is as important as the volume of gas delivered.

If an AI campus becomes dependent on gas generation rather than utility power, the gas pipeline becomes part of the data center's critical infrastructure. A pipeline interruption can effectively become the equivalent of a transmission outage. Multiple sources and pipeline paths therefore perform a function like redundant utility feeds in a conventional data center.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the Homer City site is something the developer did not have to build. The former coal plant was already a major generating node with substantial transmission infrastructure, substations, water systems, industrial zoning and interconnection into the regional electric network.

The site has access to both the PJM and New York ISO transmission systems. That is enormously important in the current data center market. A developer can purchase hundreds of acres almost anywhere. What it cannot easily purchase is an existing multi-gigawatt transmission node with decades of power-generation history.

Reusing retired coal sites potentially eliminates several years of the work associated with acquiring rights of way, establishing industrial land use and building entirely new electrical corridors.

Homer City is No Longer a Paper Project

There is another important difference between Homer City and many announced gigawatt-scale data center power developments. The construction is visibly advanced.

Pennsylvania DEP issued Homer City's principal air-quality plan approval in November 2025. By May 2026, Homer City Redevelopment said 14 of 18 material DEP permits and six of eight building permits had been issued. Vertical construction had begun with the site's gas-insulated switchgear building after crews moved approximately 3 million cubic yards of material. By early September, Homer City Generation said the active construction workforce had surpassed 1,800 direct-hire tradespeople and skilled contractors, with the total expected to approach 2,000 by year-end.

Major generating equpment is now arriving at the site. Heavy-haul transport of the first heat-recovery steam generator components began September 16, part of a program to move 15 HRSGs weighing approximately 228,000 to 438,000 pounds apiece to Homer City during September and October. Those HRSGs are core equipment for the combined-cycle plants, marking the transition from site preparation and civil work into installation of the generating infrastructure itself.

Homer City continues to target first electricity during 2027, with full commissioning and build-out extending beyond the first generating units.

AWS Brings the Data Center Side Into Focus

For much of Homer City's development, one of the largest unanswered questions was simply who needs the 4.4 GW of power? Amazon Web Services is now publicly advancing a data center campus at Homer City that is itself extraordinary in scale.

Documents presented to Indiana County describe an AWS development covering approximately 2,200 acres in Center and Blacklick townships. The current preliminary plan contemplates 39 data center buildings, along with electrical and operational support facilities, developed in phases over roughly a decade.

AWS has said the development would support existing customer demand and could eventually create approximately 1,500 to 2,000 permanent jobs. The company has also told local officials it does not intend to request county or local tax incentives and would cover costs associated with electrical infrastructure specifically required for its project.

Rather than building an enormous merchant gas plant and hoping data center customers eventually arrive, Homer City now has a publicly identified prospective hyperscale anchor with a campus proposal capable of absorbing enormous amounts of power. But all is not clear sailing.

On September 9, 2026, the Indiana County Planning Commission voted to table AWS's preliminary land-development application.  The action followed a heavily attended public meeting at which AWS presented information on jobs, sound, water and other aspects of the campus while residents raised environmental, infrastructure and transparency concerns.

The commission's action initiates a roughly 90-day review period rather than approving the AWS proposal immediately. That is the most important near-term distinction in assessing Homer City's development risk.

The power plant is under active construction. The AWS data center campus is not yet fully approved. Those two timelines can move independently for a period, but eventually they must converge.

If AWS becomes the primary consumer of Homer City power, the commercial value of completing generation capacity will increasingly depend on how rapidly AWS can obtain land-development, environmental and building approvals and begin ramping IT load.

Water and Emissions Will Remain Central Issues

Homer City's power architecture also differs dramatically from Aligned's Shippingport approach on cooling. DEP's air permit identifies seven eight-cell cooling towers associated with the new generating units. Combined-cycle plants use steam cycles, and rejecting heat from those systems can require significant cooling infrastructure. The former power station already had substantial water infrastructure, one of the reasons the brownfield site is attractive.

But the power plant's cooling requirements should not be confused with the cooling design of AWS's proposed data centers. Details about the ultimate AWS mechanical architecture, including the balance among air cooling, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and water-consuming heat rejection, have not yet been publicly established at the same level of detail.

Emissions will also remain central to the debate, even though Homer City’s developers say the new natural-gas generation will produce roughly 60% to 65% less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than the former coal station.

That is plausible as a carbon-intensity comparison between efficient combined-cycle gas generation and an old coal plant, but it does not make Homer City a low-carbon power project in absolute terms. A multi-gigawatt natural-gas complex operating at high capacity factors will still consume enormous quantities of fossil fuel and produce substantial carbon emissions. The scale of the facility means environmental debates are likely to focus increasingly on absolute emissions and upstream methane as well as emissions per megawatt-hour.

DEP's permitting analysis also addresses conventional pollutants. The combined-cycle units use selective catalytic reduction for NOx control and oxidation catalysts for carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds. DEP's review additionally examined hazardous-air-pollutant risks and air-quality modeling.

Pennsylvania's Coal Fleet Is Becoming AI Infrastructure

The larger significance of Project Phoenix and Homer City extends beyond the individual developments. For decades, the most valuable feature of a coal plant was the generator. For AI data center developers, the more durable assets may be everything that surrounded it: high-voltage transmission, substations, pipeline and water infrastructure, industrial zoning, large contiguous sites, transportation access and communities accustomed to hosting industrial-scale energy facilities.

Retired power plants also solve one of the hardest problems confronting today's hyperscale developers: acquiring firm power without waiting years for an entirely new high-voltage transmission system. Shippingport and Homer City are effectively monetizing those legacy assets in different ways.

Aligned is placing generation close to the servers and attempting to bypass the grid constraint through behind-the-meter fuel cells.  Homer City is rebuilding centralized generation at extraordinary scale and inviting hyperscale computing to locate next to the power.

Which Project Is Further Along?

Measured strictly by physical construction, Homer City is ahead. The generating plant has principal environmental approvals, thousands of workers have cycled through the project, vertical construction is underway and major HRSG components are arriving this month.

Project Phoenix has achieved several equally important development milestones, including local approval, an expensive land acquisition and construction of dedicated gas infrastructure, but there is less public evidence so far of Aligned's full data-center vertical construction program.

On the data center side, however, both still have major questions. Aligned has yet to identify its tenant publicly or disclose Project Phoenix's critical IT capacity.  Homer City has now identified AWS as the prospective hyperscale occupant, but AWS's local application was just tabled for additional review.

Time to Usable Megawatts

If Aligned can deploy modular fuel-cell generation while the larger Shippingport Power Station remains under development, Project Phoenix could energize meaningful capacity without waiting for the traditional utility-generation cycle.

If Homer City can commission its first combined-cycle blocks beginning in 2027 while AWS moves through its approvals and starts constructing the first portion of a 39-building campus, the former coal plant could provide something extraordinarily scarce in the U.S. market: gigawatts of dispatchable power directly adjacent to a hyperscale development site.

That makes the two western Pennsylvania projects worth watching together. They are not simply giant data centers. They are contrasting blueprints for what the next generation of AI infrastructure may look like when the data center developer can no longer assume the grid will simply provide the power.

At Data Center Frontier, we talk the industry talk and walk the industry walk. In that spirit, DCF Staff members may occasionally use AI tools to assist with content. 

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