AWS files plan for 36-building campus at former Pennsylvania coal plant

Amazon Web Services has filed a preliminary land development plan for a 36-building data center campus on 1,100 acres in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, at the Homer City Energy Campus, where Pennsylvania's largest coal-burning power station, a 2GW plant that operated from 1969 to 2023, as Data Center Dynamics reported, has left behind the grid connection, controlled footprint, and heavy-industry-tolerant community a greenfield site would have to assemble from scratch.

The retired coal plant is the premise of the project. AWS first told Homer City Redevelopment in early August that it was interested in building there, and the plan filed since spreads the campus across six named sites—Bruner, Helen, Green, West, Harvey/Gaston and Rura—in Center and Blacklick Townships. This publication has tracked developers paying for power that already exists at legacy industrial sites, and Homer City takes that logic to a scale none of the earlier examples approached.

The campus will be powered by a 4.5GW natural gas generating facility that Homer City Redevelopment is building, with most of the plant's output earmarked for the data center campus and more than 1GW injected back into the grid. Plans for the gas facility were announced last year with data centers named as a targeted customer; the AWS campus is the offtake the plant was designed around.

At 2GW, the coal station Homer City is replacing could supply a regional grid, while the new plant is sized for 36 buildings and still carries more than a gigawatt to sell—hyperscaler procurement now runs in this direction, with the customer commissioning power rather than shopping for it, and the gas plant is the clearest version of the arrangement on AWS's Pennsylvania books.

For the private infrastructure investor, the structure of the filing is as instructive as its size: a captive gas plant, more than a gigawatt exported, and a named financing partner in Knighthead Capital Management, which is helping fund the project. That is the template the market rewards: anchor-backed digital assets priced as infrastructure, with merchant shells built on promises priced far lower.

Each of the 36 buildings is planned at two stories and 70 feet, with 225,000 square feet of floor space apiece, which puts the campus at roughly 8.1 million square feet, and construction runs in four phases—the first beginning in December 2026, the last in January 2032, and full completion targeted for June 2036. The plan also covers ancillary office and storage space, electrical substation infrastructure, occupied and unoccupied security features, and redundant electrical generation, and once operational the campus is expected to support 1,500 to 2,000 jobs with salaries averaging between $80,000 and $100,000.

The community benefits agreement is the least defined part of the plan and possibly the one that matters most. AWS has committed to negotiate an agreement to mitigate community impacts and ensure the project delivers tangible local benefits, but coverage of the filing does not describe its terms, and in a township where a single facility anchors the tax base the shape of that agreement—payments, infrastructure, and what happens if the campus is ever scaled back—tends to decide whether a project of this size clears local review. Earlier this month AWS said it would drop non-disclosure agreements for its data center projects and committed $1bn in additional community investments across the US, moves that read as an answer to precisely this local scrutiny.

Homer City is one entry in a broader Pennsylvania program in which Amazon has pledged to invest about $20bn across multiple campuses. Separately, AWS has been looking to develop in Salem Township since early 2024, where it acquired an existing data center from Talen Energy and about 1,200 acres adjacent to the latter's nuclear plant, with the aim of building up to 15 buildings, and it has also been looking at Falls and Kline Townships. Coal in Indiana County, nuclear outside Salem Township: the portfolio spreads its bets across two firm-power technologies, and each site leans on an interconnection a generating asset has already secured.

A first phase that breaks ground in December 2026 and a final phase that begins more than five years later sit on either side of whatever happens to gas prices, turbine lead times and equipment supply in between. Phasing lets AWS add capacity as demand shows up rather than all at once, and the more than 1GW returned to the grid gives the gas plant an outlet that does not run through the campus. A preliminary plan cannot settle whether that plant will still be the cheapest firm power in Indiana County when the last phase starts in 2032.