Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads.
Development of the 3,200-acre natural gas-powered datacenter campus is being led by Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) and is expected to exceed $10 billion for power infrastructure and site readiness alone, with additional billions anticipated for the datacenter development.
As we understand it, the plant and server campus will be next to each other, as depicted in this video. The power station site will need rebuilding not only to turn it into a gas-fired system but also because it's pretty much demolished, save for electrical infrastructure such as transmission lines that can be reused.
HCR has yet to disclose a tenant for what's hoped to be a massive datacenter complex, with its emphasis for now largely on building out the energy infrastructure and datacenter shell in anticipation of future demand.
The project's backers, including Knighthead Capital Management, appear confident that demand will follow, with the campus designed to deliver up to 4.5 gigawatts of power to run AI and hyperscale workloads.
Power for the facility will be provided by seven General Electric Vernova Turbines, which will run on either natural gas or — assuming we can work out the kinks in the green-hydrogen supply chain — H2.
Until that happens, the site won't exactly be a bright spot on hyperscalers' annual sustainability reports, though HCR claims the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units.
Kiewit Power Constructors is expected to begin work on the facility later this year with the first generators installed in 2026; the site is expected to start generating power by 2027 — just in time for Nvidia's 600 kilowatt Kyber racks to make their debut.
Building at the former Homer City Generating Station has its advantages. The decommissioned – read: leveled – 2-gigawatt coal plant still has much of the critical infrastructure necessary to support a gas generator plant including, as we indicated, transmission lines, substations, and water access.
In total the developers anticipate the project creating more than 10,000 new construction jobs and approximately 1,000 "direct and indirect" technology, operations, and energy infrastructure roles.
The Homer City datacenter complex is one of a growing number of large-scale power projects designed to address AI's exploding appetite for power. For example, Meta announced a AI datacenter campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The project was accompanied by a collaboration with Entergy to install three combined-cycle combustion turbines totaling 2.2 gigawatts of generation capacity to support the development.
Like the Homer City development, these generators also have the potential to be transitioned over to hydrogen fuel.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is working with Constellation Energy, aiming to bring the idled Three Mile Island Unit 1 fission reactor back online as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement aimed at ensuring a steady supply of clean energy for its own bit barns.
Amazon has gone nuclear with the $650 million acquisition of Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters at the site of the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in northeast Pennsylvania. Meta and Oracle are talking up nuclear projects, with the former looking to purchase upwards of four gigawatts of fission power by the early 2030s, and the latter looking to power a one gigawatt datacenter using a trio of small modular reactors (SMRs).
However, as we just explored, the sudden resurgence of interest in nuclear has no shortage of roadblocks ranging from regulatory hurdles and public perception to the economic realities posed by SMRs. ®