Aligned Data Centers officially broke ground on Project Phoenix on September 10, 2026 — a 2 GW data center campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, backed by an estimated $10 billion investment. The development spans three separate buildings within the Shippingport Industrial Park in Beaver County, and is designed to meet the surging demand for high-density digital infrastructure across western Pennsylvania.
The site carries significant historical weight. Shippingport is home to what was the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, which came online in 1958. For decades, the area remained a key energy hub for the region — until the closure of the Bruce Mansfield coal-fired plant in 2019, a 2.49 GW facility previously operated by FirstEnergy and later by Energy Harbor. In 2022, Frontier Group of Companies acquired the land from Energy Harbor and began remediation and redevelopment of the 660-acre industrial park. Frontier is now developing a 3.6 GW natural gas power plant, with behind-the-meter capacity that will supply the campus directly, bypassing the public grid entirely.
Project Phoenix will not rely on the local grid for its primary power supply. The campus will be served by a dedicated, self-contained energy source — a choice that alleviates pressure on regional transmission infrastructure and, according to estimates, will allow excess capacity to be fed back to the operator of the country’s largest electricity grid. Each of the three campus buildings will exceed 55,000 square meters, purpose-built for AI workloads and high-performance computing. The model is one of vertical integration: energy production and digital infrastructure sharing the same physical footprint.
On the jobs front, Aligned projects approximately 3,000 construction-phase positions and 640 permanent full-time roles once the campus reaches full operational capacity. Construction will be led by Holder Construction and Kokosing, two firms with deep experience in large-scale infrastructure projects. Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap described the development as the transformation of a dormant industrial site into a new economic engine for western Pennsylvania, with a stated goal of delivering long-term prosperity for local workers and communities — alongside meeting growing customer demand.
Shippingport is thus returning to the center of the American energy map, in a different but equally consequential role. Where coal — and before that, nuclear fission — once generated electricity for the region, the site will now host the digital infrastructure powering artificial intelligence. The connection to nuclear energy is more than geographic: the decision to anchor a major campus to a dedicated, grid-independent power source echoes the same logic that led, nearly seven decades ago, to building the first commercial reactor on this very ground. If the 3.6 GW gas plant comes online on schedule, Project Phoenix stands to become one of the largest energy-independent digital campuses in the world.
