Pennsylvania's largest coal plant converts to 4.5GW gas-fired power to support AI datacenter hub.
Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) announced plans to develop a 3,200-acre natural gas-powered datacenter campus at the site of Pennsylvania's former largest coal plant, bringing up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027. The project, backed by investors including Knighthead Capital Management, is expected to exceed $10 billion for power infrastructure and site readiness alone, with additional billions anticipated for datacenter development. The campus is designed to deliver up to 4.5 gigawatts of power to run AI and high-performance computing workloads, though HCR has yet to disclose a tenant for the complex.
Power for the facility will be provided by seven General Electric Vernova Turbines, which will run on either natural gas or hydrogen, pending development of the green-hydrogen supply chain. 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. The site will be rebuilt not only to convert to gas-fired generation but also because the original 2-gigawatt coal plant has been largely demolished, though critical infrastructure including transmission lines, substations, and water access remain available for reuse.
Kiewit Power Constructors is expected to begin work on the facility later in 2026, with the first generators installed in 2026 and the site expected to start generating power by 2027. The developers anticipate the project will create more than 10,000 new construction jobs and approximately 1,000 "direct and indirect" technology, operations, and energy infrastructure roles. The timing aligns with emerging demand, such as Nvidia's 600 kilowatt Kyber racks making their debut in 2027.
The Homer City project is one of a growing number of large-scale power initiatives designed to address AI's exploding appetite for power. Meta announced a similar AI datacenter campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, with a collaboration with Entergy to install three combined-cycle combustion turbines totaling 2.2 gigawatts of generation capacity. Microsoft is working with Constellation Energy to bring the idled Three Mile Island Unit 1 fission reactor back online under a 20-year power purchase agreement, while Amazon acquired Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters at the Susquehanna nuclear power plant site for $650 million. Meta is looking to purchase upwards of four gigawatts of fission power by the early 2030s, and Oracle is looking to power a one gigawatt datacenter using a trio of small modular reactors (SMRs).