US Independent Power Producer Talen Energy has made two major power generation acquisitions in Ohio and Pennsylvania to support its capacity to power the data center sector.

The company acquired the 1.058GW Moxie Freedom Project located in Salem Township, Pennsylvania, from Caithness Energy, and the 1.875GW Guernsey County Power Station in Ohio from Caithness and BlackRock. Both power plants are gas-fired projects.

The acquisitions were completed for a total of $3.5 billion, with the deal expected to close in Q4 of 2025.

“This acquisition enhances Talen’s fleet by selectively adding modern, highly efficient baseload H-class CCGTs in Talen’s key markets, where we are an innovator in data center contracting,” said Mac McFarland, Talen president and chief executive officer.

“The transaction is immediately and highly accretive, maintains our balance sheet discipline, and adds more than the equivalent of another Susquehanna nuclear plant to our platform, further enabling large load service.”

The company said that the acquisitions would enhance its ability to offer reliable, scalable, grid-supported, and regionally diverse "low-carbon" capacity to hyperscale data centers and large commercial off-takers.

Talen Energy is best known in the data center sector due to its canceled behind-the-meter deal with AWS to power a data center directly from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The deal, which was originally signed last year, would have seen Talen supply power through a private wire to the data center. However, after opposition from utilities, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ultimately rejected the agreement.

Following this, the companies signed a 17-year in-front-of-the-meter Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to supply AWS with 1.92GW of energy from the 2.5GW Susquehanna nuclear power plant. The PPA is contracted until 2042 and contains an option to extend.

The deal represented a pivot away from colocation for Talen, who in May announced it was set to refocus its energy on traditional power contracts. Through the recent acquisitions, it seems that Talen is looking to bolster its power generation profile within the PJM Interconnection market to support skyrocketing data center demand across the region.