Amazon Web Services has filed a preliminary land development plan with Indiana County, Pennsylvania, for a campus of 36 data center buildings at the Homer City Energy Campus, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, Data Center Dynamics reported on 6 October. AWS said in August that it was in talks with the site's developer, Homer City Redevelopment.
According to the filing as reported, the campus covers some 1,100 acres in Center and Blacklick Townships, spread over six sites. Each building is planned with two storeys, a height of 70 feet and 225,000 square feet of floor space. The plan also lists offices, storage, substation infrastructure and redundant electrical generation. Construction is to run in four phases from December 2026, with the last phase starting in January 2032 and completion targeted for June 2036. The filing puts the number of jobs at 1,500 to 2,000.
From Coal Station To Gas Turbines
The site is that of the Homer City Generating Station, a 2 GW coal plant that ran from 1969 to 2023 and was the largest coal-burning plant in Pennsylvania. In 2025 Homer City Redevelopment and the contractor Kiewit announced a gas-fired plant of up to 4.5 GW in its place, built around seven GE Vernova 7HA.02 turbines, described as hydrogen-enabled and fed with gas from the Marcellus Shale. At the time the partners expected the first power in 2027.
Data Center Dynamics reports that most of the plant's output will go to the data center campus, while more than 1 GW will be fed into the grid.
Backup Power Next To A Power Station
A campus that sits beside its own 4.5 GW plant still asks for redundant generation of its own. That is not a contradiction. A turbine can trip, a line or a transformer inside the campus can fail, and an operator wants every data hall to ride through those events on its own source. The report does not say what form the redundant generation will take.
What the project does show is how much heat ends up on one site: gas turbines, data halls and the standby generation the filing calls for, each with its own cooling, its own noise and its own space on the plot plan. Projects of this size are planned around gas turbines and data center loads at the same time, and the cooling equipment of each has to fit the same summer weather.
Sources: Data Center Dynamics, Marcellus Drilling News, American Public Power Association
