Aligned Data Centers has broken ground on Project Phoenix, a 2GW campus in Shippingport, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, located within the 660-acre Shippingport Industrial Park about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. The campus will consist of three facilities adjacent to the former Bruce Mansfield coal plant site, now being redeveloped by Frontier Group of Companies into a natural gas energy campus capable of supplying up to 3.6GW of behind-the-meter capacity. Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap said the project will use a dedicated on-site power source rather than the local electrical grid. Aligned was acquired last year for $40 billion by a consortium including the AI Infrastructure Partnership, MGX, and BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners.
A 2GW campus is among the largest single data center developments announced in the United States, and its behind-the-meter power model, drawing from a private natural gas campus rather than the grid, sets a precedent for how large operators may sidestep grid capacity constraints. The redevelopment of a shuttered 2.49GW coal plant site into AI infrastructure illustrates a growing pattern of repurposing legacy industrial energy land to meet data center power demands at gigawatt scale.
A gigawatt-scale campus groundbreaking by Aligned Energy in Pennsylvania is a major infrastructure milestone, representing one of the largest announced data center projects in the region. The scale and named operator make this highly newsworthy.