By Rodger Morrow, Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business
Listen to a podcast discussion about this article.
Beaver County, which once measured its progress in smokestacks and tonnage, now appears to be measuring it in square feet of server racks and decibels of humming air handlers.
The latest evidence arrived this week courtesy of Aligned Data Centers, which has quietly—well, relatively quietly—advanced plans for what it is calling Project Phoenix: a proposed $10 billion data center campus rising from a 593-acre stretch of land near the former Bruce Mansfield Power Plant along the Ohio River.
The project would occupy land in and around the Shippingport Industrial Park, bounded by Church Lane, Frankfort Road, and Shippingport Road—geography familiar to anyone who’s watched Beaver County reinvent itself every 25 years or so without ever changing its accent.
The proposal is not modest. Aligned envisions three two-story data center buildings, each standing 59 feet tall and together totaling just shy of 2 million square feet. One clocks in at 672,924 square feet; the other two at roughly 638,000 square feet apiece. For perspective, that’s enough floor space to make a shopping mall feel insecure about its life choices.
There would also be a two-story warehouse and office building, nearly 147,000 square feet in size, plus a 70-acre natural gas power generation pad—because nothing says “cloud computing” quite like on-site power generation humming away next to the river.
In the company’s own words, the campus would include everything from access roads and stormwater facilities to landscaping, utilities, and a “secure no-climb fence.” Beaver County, after all, has learned the hard way that if something looks climbable, someone will try.
Variances, Variances Everywhere
To make all this happen, Aligned has asked Shippingport Borough for a handful of variances—nothing dramatic by modern standards, but enough to keep zoning boards gainfully employed.
Among them: permission to exceed the borough’s 45-foot height limit by about 20 feet; approval to clear or develop up to 75% of the site’s woodland; and authorization for 24-hour construction noise, instead of the borough’s traditional 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. window.
The argument is practical, if not exactly poetic: round-the-clock construction shortens the overall timeline and reduces traffic congestion. In other words, we can be inconvenienced intensely for a shorter period, or mildly for a longer one. Pick your poison.
Noise, inevitably, is the trickiest issue. Aligned is seeking a modification allowing data-center operations to reach 65 decibels at the nearest residence, rather than at the property line as current ordinances require. The company notes that nearby industrial uses already operate under similar limits and cites EPA data showing that sound levels inside a home are typically 15 decibels lower than outside.
This is the part of the presentation where engineers talk soothingly about attenuation while residents imagine a permanent background whirr, like living next to a very polite jet engine.
What’s Been Approved—and What Hasn’t
On January 28, the Shippingport Borough Council approved most of the conditional use permit and related modifications. Two noise-related items remain outstanding and will be voted on at a later date, according to Borough Solicitor Richard Urick.
Before construction can begin, the project must still clear several regulatory hurdles, including a mass grading permit from the borough and NPDES and stormwater permits from the Beaver County Conservation District and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Those applications, along with an emergency management plan, have already been filed.
The site itself includes six parcels Aligned does not yet own but intends to acquire. Of the nearly 400 acres to be graded, about 155 acres would be occupied by buildings, equipment yards, and power generation facilities.
Parking will be provided for 250 vehicles, fewer than Shippingport regulations typically require—an implicit admission that data centers employ far more servers than people.
The Bigger Pattern
If all this feels familiar, it should. Beaver County has become something of a magnet for data centers, drawn by abundant power infrastructure, river access, and land once dedicated to heavier—and smokier—industrial uses.
Where turbines once spun and boilers roared, servers will now blink quietly, processing data for people who may never know where Shippingport is, let alone how to pronounce it.
It’s a remarkable pivot and a telling one. We no longer export steel; we export uptime. We no longer measure output in megawatts consumed but in megawatts managed.
Whether Project Phoenix rises exactly as proposed or with a few negotiated tweaks, the direction is clear. Beaver County, it seems, can’t get enough of data centers—and the future, for better or worse, is humming along the Ohio River at about 65 decibels.
