By Laila Kearney <\/p>\n
NEW YORK, Aug 11 (Reuters) – AI infrastructure company Alpha Compute has signed a binding term sheet to acquire land and natural gas rights in Pennsylvania for $55 million \u200cto develop a 200-megawatt data center campus, CEO Brittany Kaiser told Reuters on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Surging demand for \u200cartificial intelligence computing is driving a scramble for power supplies across the United States, prompting data center developers to secure their \u200bown energy sources rather than wait for grid connections. <\/p>\n
Pennsylvania — with its abundance of natural gas from the Marcellus shale basin, existing power infrastructure and proximity to major population centers on the East Coast — has become one of the country’s most sought-after locations for new data centers. Last year, Amazon announced $20 billion in \u200cplanned investment in the state. <\/p>\n
Alpha Compute \u2060expects the northern Pennsylvania site, which would include gas-fired power generation, to begin operating in the third quarter of 2027, Kaiser said. The facility could eventually \u2060be expanded to generate one gigawatt of power, Kaiser added. <\/p>\n
The project would combine data center development with natural gas production and on-site electricity generation, an increasingly popular approach as utilities struggle to quickly connect large AI facilities to \u200bthe grid. \u200bThe deal would include undeveloped Marcellus gas rights covering about \u200b1,800 mineral acres, Kaiser said. <\/p>\n
The agreement \u200cgives the British Virgin Islands-incorporated company an exclusive option to acquire the assets, but the transaction remains subject to due diligence, financing, permitting and final agreements. Kaiser said she expects to close the deal after a 60-day diligence period. Details of the project have not been previously reported. <\/p>\n
The project will also require local approvals at a time when some communities have tightened restrictions on data centers because \u200cof their electricity and water demands. Kaiser said local communities \u200bhad so far been receptive to the proposal, whose exact \u200blocation has not been disclosed. <\/p>\n
While Alpha Compute \u200bhas traditionally provided confidential-computing services, it is a recent entrant to data \u200ccenter development. The Pennsylvania project, if it moves \u200bahead, would be the \u200bcompany’s first data center development in the United States. <\/p>\n
After the initial $55 million investment, Kaiser said she expects the build-out of the data center campus, including electrical connections, to run about $500 million \u200bspread out over years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Laila Kearney NEW YORK, Aug 11 (Reuters) – AI infrastructure company Alpha Compute has signed a binding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111320,111319,3069,20374,28,30,29,111322,111321],"class_list":["post-263379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-alpha-compute","tag-brittany-kaiser","tag-data-center","tag-natural-gas","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-power-supplies","tag-secure-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}