Supersized data centers are coming. See how they will transform America.

This coal plant in central Pennsylvania, once the largest in the state, was shuttered in 2023 after powering the region for over 50 years.

Earlier this year, wrecking crews blasted the plant’s cooling towers and soaring chimneys.

Rising from the dust in Homer City will be a colossal artificial intelligence data center campus that will include seven 30-acre gas generating stations on-site, fueled by Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom. Shawn Steffee of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers is hopeful.

“The closing of the coal plant had been really brutal,” he said. “But this project just took the entire chess board and flipped it.”

The Homer City facility will generate and consume as much power as all the homes in the Philadelphia urban area. It is among a generation of new supersized data centers sprouting across the country, the footprints of which are measured in miles, not feet.

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