Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 10, 2026
Amazon Web Services has filed plans for a 36-building data center campus at the Homer City Energy Campus in Indiana County, Pennsylvania — approximately 50 miles east of Pittsburgh.
The numbers are significant. 36 data center buildings, each 225,000 square feet across two stories. 1,100 acres of developed campus across 2,200 acres acquired. 4.5 gigawatts of power from a new natural gas plant being built on the same site. $20 billion total AWS investment pledged across Pennsylvania. Construction beginning December 2026, with the final phase completing in January 2032.
The site previously hosted the Homer City Generating Station, Pennsylvania's largest coal-burning power plant, which operated from 1969 to 2023. Amazon is replacing one energy installation with another — this time dedicated primarily to powering its own cloud infrastructure.
Most of the 4.5GW gas plant's output will power the data center campus directly. More than 1GW will flow to the broader grid.
The energy question nobody is asking
Trump promised data centers and AI dominance. AWS is delivering. The Homer City campus alone will consume the equivalent output of a significant power plant, around the clock, indefinitely.
The AI race requires compute. Compute requires power. Power from natural gas means carbon emissions — from a site that was already retired as a coal plant for environmental reasons, now being rebuilt and expanded to serve a technology industry that simultaneously claims climate commitments.
The company building the largest data center campus in Pennsylvania history is the same company whose AWS platform powers a significant portion of the internet, whose AI investment partnerships are under FTC investigation, and whose cloud infrastructure sits at the center of the Pentagon's Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract.
What this means for AI infrastructure
The Homer City campus represents the physical reality behind the AI race rhetoric. Models require training. Training requires compute. Compute requires power. Power requires infrastructure at a scale most people don't visualize when they use a chatbot.
A 36-building data center campus powered by a dedicated 4.5 gigawatt gas plant is what winning the AI race looks like on the ground. It looks like a new industrial city in rural Pennsylvania running on natural gas, twenty-four hours a day, for decades.
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