Aligned Breaks Ground on 2GW "Project Phoenix" Data Center Campus in Pennsylvania
Aligned Data Centers has broken ground on “Project Phoenix,” a 2 gigawatt data center campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, according to a company announcement distributed via GlobeNewswire. The three-facility campus is expected to anchor roughly $10 billion in regional economic investment and sits within the Shippingport Industrial Park in Beaver County, adjacent to the former Shippingport Power Station, the site of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States.
Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap said the project “transforms a dormant industrial site into a foundational asset for the local community,” adding that the campus is designed to fuel regional economic growth while adhering to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) requirements. Aligned has also signed the state’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
Rather than drawing directly from the local grid, Project Phoenix will run on a dedicated onsite power source, with the company saying the completed campus is expected to eventually deliver excess power capacity back to the regional grid. Each facility will use a closed-loop cooling system that continuously recycles deionized water, which Aligned says gives the campus a water footprint comparable to a standard commercial office building; the company is also pursuing Green Globes certification for the site.
Holder Construction and Kokosing are the general contractors on the project. Holder Construction CEO Beth Lowry said the company is “proud to partner with Aligned on this transformative project,” while Kokosing CEO Brett Burgett said the build will give “thousands of highly skilled tradespeople the opportunity to build the future of their own community.”
Aligned estimates Project Phoenix will support approximately 3,000 construction jobs during the build-out, plus about 640 full-time positions once the campus is operational, along with additional indirect jobs through the regional supply chain. The company expects the project to generate new annual government revenue for Beaver County.
What It Means for Subcontractors
A three-facility, 2 GW campus of this scale means sustained, multi-year subcontracting demand across civil, electrical, mechanical, and specialty trades in Western Pennsylvania — general contractors Holder Construction and Kokosing will need deep benches of local skilled labor to hit the estimated 3,000-job construction workforce. The dedicated onsite power source and closed-loop cooling system also point to significant electrical infrastructure and specialty mechanical subcontracting scope beyond standard building trades, and the redevelopment of the adjacent former Shippingport Power Station site into a natural gas energy campus suggests parallel energy-infrastructure work may follow in the same footprint.
