Aligned Data Centers has broken ground in Shippingport on a campus it says will use a dedicated onsite power source, in a town of 154 people where a 2.49-gigawatt coal plant closed in 2019.
· 3 min read · L1 Power and land · The Pulse, 10 September 2026
On 10 September 2026, Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Project Phoenix, a 2-gigawatt data centre campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. A data centre is a building full of computers, and its size is counted in the electricity it can draw; a gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. Aligned's release says the campus will use a dedicated onsite power source rather than the local electrical grid, and that it anchors an estimated $10 billion in regional economic investment. Data Center Dynamics reports the site will hold three facilities in the Shippingport Industrial Park, which is owned by the Frontier Group of Companies.
This site has made power before. The Bruce Mansfield coal plant there was a 2.49-gigawatt plant that launched in 1976 and shut in 2019, according to DCD. The new campus is sized at 2 gigawatts, about 80 percent of what that coal plant could generate, which is 2 divided by 2.49, this desk's arithmetic. Salena Zito, writing from the site, puts it as "roughly the output of the coal plant it replaces." The jobs are large for the place too. Aligned estimates 640 full-time operations jobs, and Zito counts Shippingport's population at 154. The estimated permanent jobs are more than four times the number of people who live in the town.
It also matters because of the grid around it. A study for Pennsylvania's utility regulator, dated 14 September, puts the PJM grid's modelled 2030 loss-of-load expectation at 0.59 in its reference scenario, nearly six times worse than PJM's planning criterion. Aligned's plan is to stay off that grid: its release says the campus will use a dedicated onsite power source rather than the local grid and, once completed, is expected to deliver excess power capacity back to it.
Everything depends on the onsite power being built. Aligned's release describes the neighbouring former coal plant as being redeveloped into a natural gas energy campus. DCD reports Frontier planned a 2.7-gigawatt gas plant at the site, served by EQT and National Fuel Gas, and said the site will be able to offer up to 3.6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter capacity, meaning power delivered directly without passing through the grid. None of these documents gives a date for when the gas plant or the first data hall will run.
The tenant is not named. No date is given for first capacity. The $10 billion is the company's estimate of regional economic investment, not a stated figure for its own spending. The sources also describe the site differently: Aligned's release says the campus sits adjacent to the former power station, while Zito writes that Project Phoenix "will rise on the Mansfield footprint". We report both.
If you pay a power bill in the PJM region, the question for each new data centre is whether it adds to the grid's load or brings its own supply. This one says it brings its own. Watch for the gas plant's construction: until it runs, the 2 gigawatts is a plan, and so is the promise to send power back.
Everything above is written from these. Each line says what that document proves.
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