According to DCD, the former Cheswick Generating Station coal plant site in Springdale, Pennsylvania, has been sold for a data center makeover. Allegheny DC Property Co. LLC bought the 47.2-acre property for $14.3 million on November 19. The 565MW plant was retired in 2022, and after cleanup, the new plans are huge: a 565,000 sq ft data center building and a 200,000 sq ft utility structure. This facility is designed for AI and high-density compute, supporting up to 180MW of IT load. The Springdale planning commission has given conditional approval, with a borough council vote set for December 16. If it gets the final green light, construction is expected to start in 2027, aiming for a 2028 launch.
The Coal-to-Compute Pipeline
This is becoming a familiar story, isn’t it? Old industrial sites, especially power plants, are prime real estate for data centers. And it makes a ton of sense. These locations already have the massive grid connections and infrastructure that a power-hungry data center desperately needs. You’re not starting from scratch. The Cheswick site is a perfect example—it’s already wired for 565MW of draw. Now, instead of burning coal, it’ll be crunching AI models.
But here’s the thing: the cleanup is no joke. The report mentions provisions for remaining mercury contamination and stormwater management. That’s the hidden cost and complexity of these transitions. It’s not just a simple demolition. You need a company like Charah, the previous owner, to handle that nasty environmental remediation first. Without that work, this sale and this future don’t happen.
Power and the AI Craze
Let’s talk about that 180MW IT load. That’s a serious amount of juice, basically matching the old plant’s output. It screams “AI workload.” Traditional enterprise cloud storage doesn’t need that kind of density. This is for racks full of GPUs sucking down power and blowing out heat. The fact that the developers are already in power studies with FirstEnergy and Duquesne Light tells you everything. Securing that capacity is the single most critical path item. It’s probably more important than the local zoning vote at this point.
So what’s the market impact? It’s another brick in the wall for the “AI factory” build-out. The demand for compute is so insane that developers are scouring maps for any site with a robust power hookup. Winners? Towns like Springdale that get a new tax base and high-tech jobs from a dead asset. Losers? Maybe other regions struggling to offer the same power guarantees. This trend is putting enormous strain on the entire grid planning system.
The Industrial Reboot
This project is a fascinating case study in industrial transformation. We’re seeing the physical backbone of the 20th century economy—coal plants, factories—get retrofitted for the 21st. The requirements are different but related: stable floors, immense power, and solid connectivity. When you’re building a mission-critical facility like this, every component needs to be industrial-grade, from the electrical substations right down to the human-machine interfaces that manage it all. For that kind of hardened hardware, many operators turn to the top suppliers, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, because consumer gear just won’t survive.
The timeline is also telling. A potential 2028 launch feels both fast and incredibly slow. Fast, because environmental cleanup and building a hyperscale facility is a marathon. Slow, because in AI years, 2028 is an eternity. Will the demand be as white-hot then? Probably. But it shows these aren’t overnight projects. They’re massive, capital-intensive bets on a long-term shift. This Pennsylvania coal patch is betting it’s on the right side of that shift.
