Pennsylvania's New 2-Gigawatt Data Center Campus Skips the Grid Entirely

Aligned Data Centers broke ground on September 10 on Project Phoenix, a three-building, two-gigawatt data center campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. The company puts the regional economic investment at $10 billion and expects the campus to support 3,000 construction jobs and 640 full-time operations positions.

The site is the former Bruce Mansfield plant, a coal station that ran from 1976 to 2019 and now sits inside a 660-acre industrial park owned by the Frontier Group of Companies. Aligned bought its parcel in July 2026 for $223 million. The scale is ordinary for this year. ConstructConnect counted $84.1 billion in U.S. data center construction starts across 136 projects through July, nearly three times the year-earlier figure, with the average project priced at $1.06 billion and running $818.20 per square foot against $520.51 in 2025.

What is not ordinary is the power arrangement. Aligned says the campus will run on a dedicated on-site source rather than the local grid. Frontier is converting the adjacent Shippingport Power Station into a gas plant it describes as significantly larger than the 2.7-gigawatt coal unit it replaces, with EQT Corporation supplying roughly 800 million cubic feet a day of Marcellus and Utica gas and National Fuel Gas moving a share of it on transportation capacity expected online this fall. Frontier expects more than a gigawatt of surplus to reach PJM Interconnection.

Behind-the-meter generation at that scale pulls work inside the fence that a grid-served build hands to the utility. Generator step-up transformers, medium-voltage distribution, switchgear line-ups, protective relaying, paralleling and load-shed controls, grounding grids, and the cable and bus tying generation to the data halls all land in contractor scope. Aligned's closed-loop cooling design, which the company says needs no operational water, pushes the mechanical package toward pumps, fans and controls wiring rather than water treatment. Holder Construction is leading the build with Kokosing Industrial, based in Carnegie, as general contractor.

Enforcement stays local. More than 90 percent of Pennsylvania municipalities administer the Uniform Construction Code using their own inspectors or certified third-party agencies, and the state Department of Labor and Industry holds no code enforcement authority in those places. Pennsylvania's current adoption is the 2018 International Code series, effective February 14, 2022. The training pipeline is local too. The Western Central Pennsylvania Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, sponsored by IBEW Local 712 and the NECA Western Pennsylvania Chapter's Beaver Division, runs a five-year apprenticeship covering Beaver, Lawrence, Mercer and Crawford counties, and it is the nearest organized source of journeymen for a job that peaks near 3,000 workers.

Bruce Mansfield burned coal in Beaver County for 43 years. The campus replacing it needs roughly five workers to build it for every one it will employ.