A developer bought the former Cheswick Generating Station, a coal plant along the Allegheny River, for 14.3 million dollars and plans a 565,000 square foot hyperscale data center there. Springdale Borough Council approved a conditional use permit for the project in a 5 to 2 vote in December 2025 despite residents raising concerns about noise and the amount of power it would draw, equal to more than 140,000 homes. No one spoke in favor of the project at the public hearing before the vote.
An operating data center site in Allegheny County, PA, mapped in OpenStreetMap and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas. About 60,000 square feet of building is mapped.
An operating Expedient data center site in Allegheny County, PA, mapped in OpenStreetMap and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas. About 27,000 square feet of building is mapped.
SunCap Property Group controls the former Pressed Steel Car industrial site in Stowe Township and has been mentioned as a possible data center location. Local officials have already passed data center rules for the township, but as of the most recent reporting SunCap had not decided whether it will actually build a data center there.
The order is meant to keep new data centers from pushing their power costs onto residential electric bills by requiring developers to pay for all of their own electricity. This does not change anyone's electric rate directly, but it is meant to stop the cost of new substations and power lines built for data centers from being added to everyone else's bill. This is the overall statewide trend behind the individual utility price to compare increases: the average Pennsylvania household's total electric bill grew by roughly a fifth between 2024 and 2026.
Governor Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on August 18, 2026, requiring large AI data center developers in Pennsylvania to sign a binding consent order agreeing to a set of standards the administration calls GRID. The order requires developers to bring and pay for their own power rather than shifting costs to households, to accept being cut off first during a grid emergency, and to show a real community benefit plan, and it blocks the state environmental agency from reviewing a data center's permits until the local community has signed off. The order also directs the state to build a public tracker of data center permit applications.
Every Pennsylvania rate case in dollars a month, with hearing dates: willmybillgoup.com, our rate case tracker.
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