Aligned Project Phoenix data center, Shippingport, Pennsylvania

Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Sept. 10, 2026 on Project Phoenix, a 2 gigawatt data center campus in Shippingport, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, built on the site of the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant. The three-building campus is in the Shippingport Industrial Park, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, next to the old Shippingport Power Station, which is being redeveloped into a natural gas energy campus. Phase one is under construction, and Shippingport's leaders have approved phase two of Aligned's land development plan, WPXI reported on Sept. 21, 2026.

Shippingport Borough Council approved Aligned's conditional use application in January 2026, allowing up to three data center buildings totaling 2 million square feet. It was the first test of a data center ordinance the borough had passed in March 2025, before officials knew Aligned was coming. Aligned, which is based in Plano, Texas, closed on a 650.89-acre property in Shippingport in late July for $223,150,865.38, Beaver County Radio reported. Frontier Group of Companies, which owns the industrial park, bought the old plant site from Energy Harbor in 2022; the 2.49 gigawatt Bruce Mansfield plant opened in 1976 and shut down in 2019. Aligned puts the project at $10 billion in regional investment, 3,000 construction jobs and more than 640 full-time jobs once it runs. The company says the campus will use a dedicated onsite power source rather than the local electrical grid, and that its closed-loop cooling system needs no water for operational cooling. Frontier has said it will build a 2.7 gigawatt natural gas plant at the site and that the park can offer up to 3.6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter capacity. BizJournals reported in February that Aligned's buildings would not at first be powered by that new plant but by a separate National Fuel Gas line. In February Aligned told local officials it was still working to secure a customer for its data centers.

Shippingport is a borough of about 160 people, and many residents first heard of the project indirectly, when some received notices about seismic testing to make sure blasting at the industrial park would not damage their foundations. "Someone jumped the gun," said Pat Lampe, the borough's emergency services coordinator. At a borough meeting days after Aligned filed its conditional use application in early December 2025, borough solicitor Rich Urick "emphasized that the project should proceed at a slower pace to allow proper review," according to meeting minutes. At Aligned's first information meeting in December, Lampe said, some people asked how the project would affect their property values, and others worried about landslides and stability in a hilly area that sits on top of mines. Resident Tim Goughnour saw the money the borough has missed: "We've lost so much revenue, we haven't been able to really care for the borough in the way we should have been able to all these years since … the loss of revenue from Bruce Mansfield". The Keystone reported that the groundbreaking went ahead despite concerns from some area residents. Jai-Ellen St. George of nearby Midland told WPXI: "I feel they're popping up everywhere like Dollar General stores." Shippingport Mayor John Erickson backed the project at the groundbreaking, saying the town had been defined by its history as "the birthplace of commercial nuclear energy" and that "Project Phoenix honors that legacy, opening a new chapter by taking a historic site and rebuilding it into a modern engine of innovation."

Aligned is not the only data center interest in the Beaver Valley. Fezzik Energy, whose partners include land developer Chuck Betters, attorney Jonathan Kamin and Joanna Doven, is working to attract data centers to former J&L Steel sites in Midland and Aliquippa. In August 2025 a Vistra subsidiary paid $4.2 million for a 74-acre farm in Hookstown, a mile from the boundary of Vistra's Beaver Valley nuclear plant, and the company declined to say what it plans there. Vistra signed a 20-year deal in January 2026 to supply power from its nuclear plants, including Beaver Valley, to offset Meta's data center demand. Springdale Borough Council voted 5-2 in December 2025 to approve converting the former Cheswick Generating Station into a data center, in a packed room where each vote drew an uproar from residents.

Aligned says Project Phoenix fits Gov. Josh Shapiro's Responsible Infrastructure Development framework and Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Shapiro said in his February budget address that "too many of these projects have been shrouded in secrecy, with local communities left in the dark about who is coming in and what they're building," and that developers "must commit to strict transparency standards and direct community engagement." Neither Aligned's groundbreaking announcement nor WPXI's Sept. 21 report gave a date for the first building to open. Locally, the campus's approvals have come from Shippingport Borough Council, which granted the conditional use in January and has now approved phase two of the land development plan.