A small Pennsylvania town that once switched on the nation's first commercial nuclear reactor just broke ground on its next act, and it's hiring by the thousands.
Aligned Data Centers held a groundbreaking on September 10 for Project Phoenix, a 2 gigawatt data center campus rising on the old Bruce Mansfield coal plant site in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Aligned and its site partner, Frontier Group, are calling it a $10 billion investment in the region. Construction is already underway.
The jobs behind the announcement
Here's what matters if you're job hunting: 3,000 construction jobs to build the three facility campus, plus 640 permanent, full time positions once it's running. Aligned's construction partners, Holder Construction and Kokosing, bring the trades work: electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, and heavy equipment operators, on site for years, not months, given the scale of the build. Add the "thousands" of indirect supply chain jobs Aligned and local officials point to, and Beaver County is looking at one of its biggest workforce ramps in decades.
Power on site, not on the grid
What makes this project different is how it gets its electricity. Instead of drawing from the regional grid, the campus runs on a dedicated, on-site natural gas plant that Frontier Group is building next door, with total site capacity reaching up to 3.6 gigawatts behind the meter. That's a second wave of hiring: plant operators, technicians, and maintenance crews to keep the power flowing independent of PJM.
Shippingport helped switch on America's first commercial nuclear reactor in 1957. Seven decades later, the same ground is training the next generation of energy and construction workers for the AI era.
A community built on energy jobs before
Shippingport has done this before. The town hosted the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the country's first full scale civilian nuclear plant, before Bruce Mansfield's coal units took over the site for more than four decades. Shippingport Mayor John Erickson called the groundbreaking a new chapter for a community whose identity has long been tied to keeping the lights on for everyone else.
The bottom line
For workers in western Pennsylvania, Project Phoenix means a multi-year hiring runway across construction trades, power plant operations, and data center technical roles, all in one place. If you've got a trade certification, or you're weighing whether to get one, this is the kind of project that turns training into a career.
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