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The last time that I stood on these grounds along the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, was 1976, 19 years after the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States opened here.
My Perry High School physics teacher, David Burrows, had loaded a handful of us into a van for a field trip to the atomic station and to the coal-fired Bruce Mansfield plant next door.
What Mr. Burrows and I both still remember is the climb - 20 flights up metal bar-grating stairs to the top of a cavernous industrial cathedral built to house Mansfield’s multi-story steam boilers - and the black mountains of coal heaped along the riverbank, waiting to be fed into them.
We were all working-class kids. Our fathers were firefighters, cops, steelworkers and mechanical engineers. When Burrows took us there, he told us we could be anyone who worked there: a welder, electrician, engineer, chemist, plumber or programmer.
“That was the point,” he said in a conversation this week. “I wanted you to see your possibilities.”
Today I’m back on the same ground, a few days after Aligned Data Centers officially broke ground on a 2-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus called Project Phoenix, and built on the footprint where part of Bruce Mansfield used to stand.
The name is not subtle, and neither is the transformation. A 660-acre industrial site that once held Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant, the 2,490-megawatt FirstEnergy behemoth that went dark in 2019, is now being rebuilt as a three-building, $10 billion complex designed to feed the country’s insatiable appetite for AI.
For most of the second half of the 20th century, Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was where America came to figure out how to make electricity at an industrial scale. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear plant, went online in 1957 and operated until 1982 as part of Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which was designed to pivot the perception of nuclear technology away from military might to civilian development.
Bruce Mansfield came online a decade later. At its peak, it was the largest coal plant in the commonwealth, moving barges of coal up the Ohio and shipping electrons out to the PJM grid that keeps the eastern seaboard lit.
When Mansfield closed in 2019, it left behind exactly what Mr. Burrows had walked us through in 1976: 660 acres of riverfront, 6,000 feet of developed waterfront, barge terminals, CSX rail and the skeletons of buildings sized for a different century.
Frontier Group of Companies bought the site in 2022 and renamed it the Shippingport Industrial Park, betting that the lonely sentinels of an old power plant would be worth more than the plant itself.
It also left behind a borough that had been quietly hollowing out for a generation. Shippingport counted 441 residents in 1950, 235 as recently as 2000, and just 154 today; roughly a third smaller than at the turn of the century and closer to half its mid-century peak.
That is what a decommissioned nuclear plant and a shuttered coal plant look like on a census sheet: fewer paychecks, fewer children in the school, higher property taxes, and fewer lights on at night along the same river that once powered the region.
Recently, Aligned, a Dallas-based operator of hyperscale data centers, announced that Project Phoenix will rise on the Mansfield footprint as a three-facility, 2-gigawatt campus. Just to understand the enormity of it, 2 gigawatts is roughly the output of the coal plant it replaces, now dedicated entirely to running the graphics processors and cooling systems that train and serve modern AI models.
The company projects 3,000 construction jobs, 640 permanent operations careers and thousands more in the regional supply chain.
Case in point: The local mom-and-pop gas station on the way to the development entrance, at the corner of Green Garden and Frankfort roads, had a brisk flow of construction workers heading into the convenience store.
The data center will not draw its power from the local grid. Rather, a dedicated onsite generation source at the neighboring former Shippingport Power Station is now being rebuilt as a natural gas energy campus. It will feed the servers directly and eventually send surplus electricity back to PJM, Aligned says.