Start with the number that is not what it looks like
Almost every large announcement in western Pennsylvania is a power announcement. A retired coal site is redeveloped, turbines are ordered, and a figure in gigawatts attaches itself to the project in every subsequent article. That figure describes what the plant can generate. It does not describe data hall space, it does not describe contracted load, and it very often precedes any tenant at all.
Homer City is the clearest case. Seven gas turbines on 3,200 acres of the former Homer City Generating Station, in Indiana County about fifty miles east of the city, rated at 4,500 MW in total. Roughly 3,700 MW of that is earmarked for data centers and the remaining 700 to 800 MW goes to the grid. The headline number and the data center number differ by the better part of a gigawatt, and only the smaller one belongs in a capacity conversation at all.
This matters because the gap is not a rounding error. Generating capacity is the input to a campus that may be built in phases over years, may be occupied by one tenant, and may never offer a square foot to the multi-tenant market. Reading a plant rating as available capacity is the same mistake as reading a generator nameplate on a construction permit as sellable load, and it is the reason this site keeps those categories apart everywhere it publishes.
The honest read of the region is therefore two markets sitting on top of each other. There is a large, genuinely significant energy and single-tenant development story across the counties around the city. And separately there is a modest, long-established enterprise colocation market inside it. The first one will change your power price and your utility's queue. Only the second one has space you can lease.
Why Pittsburgh is a market at all
Demand here is institutional. UPMC and the region's other health systems generate regulated clinical workloads at scale, PNC anchors financial services, and Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh sit behind an unusually deep local cluster in robotics, autonomy and machine learning for a metro of this size. Advanced manufacturing and the energy industry itself fill in the rest. That is enterprise demand with compliance obligations and a preference for local buildings, which is exactly the demand a mid-sized colocation market serves well.
The physical arguments are real and durable. Land and industrial buildings are cheap by coastal standards, the region is at low risk from the hazards that drive site selection elsewhere, and the fibre routes east to Philadelphia and New York and west to Chicago are well established. Pittsburgh is also a reasonable independent recovery position for a primary in either of those directions.
Buying power in a PJM state with retail choice
Pennsylvania restructured its electricity market, so the bill splits in two. Delivery stays with the regulated wires company and is set by the Public Utility Commission. Generation and supply can be bought competitively from a licensed supplier, or taken from the utility's default service if nobody shops. Inside the city and parts of Allegheny and Beaver counties the wires company is Duquesne Light; across much of the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania it is FirstEnergy's West Penn Power. All of it sits inside PJM, the regional transmission organisation, whose capacity and energy markets set the wholesale prices that feed both the competitive offers and the default rate.
For a tenant this is genuinely different from a Charlotte or a Nashville, and it cuts both ways. The upside is that the supply half of the cost is contestable, so an operator that buys well can pass a better number through, and a large enough tenant can sometimes ask how supply is procured and when it is next repriced. The downside is exposure: PJM capacity costs move, and they move for the whole zone at once, so a market-wide increase reaches every building in it regardless of how good the operator is. A quote that does not say how power is procured is hiding which of those two things you are buying.
Ask which wires company serves the building, then ask separately how the operator buys supply: default service, a fixed-term contract with a competitive supplier, or an index. Then ask when that arrangement is next repriced and how the difference reaches your invoice. Two operators in the same zone, with the same delivery tariff, can hand you materially different power terms purely on the answer to that question, and it is the one place in this market where asking early is worth real money.
Three do not. There is no permit collector pointed at Allegheny County or the counties around it, so the public filing record is not shown here. Our facility inventory does not extend to this market, so there is no verified building count. And the interconnection layer counts a building only when its city sits on an explicit list, so Pittsburgh and its suburbs are counted nowhere rather than counted wrongly. The fourth is here. The announced capacity below is collected by hand, and every figure in it was read on the page it links to before the row was written, which is also why some widely quoted numbers for this market are in the note under the table rather than in it. Announced is not built, and built is not available. See how we verify capacity for what each collection proves.
What has been announced in Pittsburgh
Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.7 GW | Homer City Redevelopment | Homer City Energy Campus | 3,200 acres on the former Homer City Generating Station in Indiana County, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, on a $10 billion initial investment. Seven gas turbines rated at 4,500 MW in total, of which roughly 3,700 MW is earmarked for data centers and 700 to 800 MW goes to the grid. Targeted to start generating in 2027. Data center share of a 4,500 MW plant |
| 180 MW | Allegheny DC Property Co. | Springdale, the former Cheswick site | A 565,000 SF building up to about seven storeys plus a 200,000 SF cooling plant, on the site of the retired Cheswick coal station in Allegheny County. Springdale borough council granted the conditional use permit 5 to 2 on 16 December 2025. Announced draw |
The figure attached to this region in almost every headline is 4,500 megawatts, and it is not data center capacity. That is the generating rating of the gas plant going up at Homer City, of which about 3,700 megawatts is earmarked for data centers. The 3,700 is what the table carries, and treating the 4,500 as capacity you could occupy is the same error as reading a generator nameplate on a permit as sellable load. Two further limits matter before either row is used to shortlist. Homer City is in Indiana County, roughly 50 miles east of the city and outside the Duquesne Light territory that serves it, and neither project is colocation anyone can lease today. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
Where the multi-tenant buildings actually are
Downtown and the North Shore
The network-facing end of the market, and the right first call when carrier choice or latency into the city is the requirement. Expedient, which is headquartered here, holds a position on the North Shore, and downtown remains where the transport options concentrate.
Parkway West and Green Tree
The suburban corridor toward the airport, which is where a good deal of the region's enterprise colocation sits. Better floor plates and easier access than downtown, materially less network, and the natural home for production and recovery workloads that do not need to sit on a carrier floor.
The northern suburbs and Butler County
Cranberry and the corridor north of the city, close to the corporate offices that moved out along Interstate 79. Worth testing when staff proximity matters more than interconnection, and worth asking which wires company serves the specific address.
Beaver, Westmoreland and Indiana counties
Where the energy and campus development story is actually happening, on former industrial and generating sites. This is the part of the region that produces the gigawatt headlines. Treat it as information about power and politics, and confirm before assuming any of it is space you could occupy.
When Pittsburgh is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Pittsburgh is the right answer for an organisation with people and obligations in western Pennsylvania: a health system, a bank, a university spinout that has outgrown a server room, a manufacturer that needs its production systems close and auditable. It is a sound independent recovery site for a primary in Philadelphia, New York or Chicago, and the cost base is friendlier than any of them.
It is the wrong choice if you need a deep interconnection ecosystem, because this is not a carrier hotel market on the scale of the ones that exist to be one. It is also the wrong choice if the plan depends on the region's announced generating capacity turning into leasable space on your timeline. That capacity is being built for large single tenants, the phasing is measured in years, and nothing about a turbine order tells you that a room will be available to you when you need it.
Separate the two halves of the power bill and get both in writing: which wires company and delivery tariff serves the building, and how the operator procures supply and when it reprices. Ask what PJM capacity cost changes do to your rate mid-term and whether the pass-through is capped. Ask what is energised in the room today rather than what the site plan contemplates. If a proposal references one of the region's large energy campuses, ask directly whether the space you would occupy is inside it, adjacent to it, or merely in the same press release, and get that distinction on paper. And because the enterprise market here trades on service rather than scale, ask what the operator's own staffing looks like on site overnight, which is a question that separates the buildings in this market more sharply than the specifications do.