12:52 PM EDT, 09/15/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Blackstone (BX) has agreed to acquire a natural gas power plant in Western Pennsylvania from private investment firm Ardian for about $1 billion amid growing electricity demand for artificial intelligence technologies.

Private equity funds affiliated with Blackstone Energy Transition Partners will purchase the 620-megawatt Hill Top Energy Center, which sells energy and capacity to the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland transmission organization, Blackstone said Monday.

In July, the private equity and real estate giant announced plans to spend more than $25 billion to support the development of Pennsylvania's digital and energy infrastructure. At the time, the firm also said it intended to invest an additional $60 billion in the state.

"The electricity infrastructure required to power the AI revolution requires a tremendous amount of capital," Bilal Khan and Mark Zhu, a senior managing director and a managing director, respectively, at Blackstone Energy Transition, said in a Monday statement. "We are proud to make our latest investment in this sector -- which is among our highest conviction investment themes -- in Western Pennsylvania."

The project will continue to support data center development in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland electric market, the firm said.

Blackstone recently invested in the 774-MW Potomac Energy Center natural gas power plant in Loudoun County, Virginia, and has been in late-stage development or construction for about 1,600 MW of new-build power generation capacity over the past 3.5 years in the US, according to the statement.

Separately, Ardian said it bought a roughly 42% stake in Hill Top Energy Center in July 2019 via its Ardian Americas Infrastructure Funds series and acquired the remaining stake in the project in April this year.

"Rapid growth in AI workloads and hyperscale data centers are fueling extraordinary power demand and driving our mission to lead the energy transition and meet demand for reliable baseload generation," Ardian Director Infrastructure Kevin Rohde said in a statement.

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