Chesapeake Utilities Corporation announced that its Ohio subsidiary, Aspire Energy Express, LLC, has entered into an agreement with American Electric Power (AEP) to construct and operate an intrastate natural gas pipeline in central Ohio to serve a new fuel-cell facility, which will provide on-site electric power to a data center. As demand for distributed data infrastructure continues to rise, investments in data centers have accelerated. AEP is playing a leading role in supporting these developments by providing solutions to customers to meet their increasing power requirements.

Chesapeake Utilities operates multiple energy infrastructure subsidiaries throughout its footprint, enabling the transmission and distribution of natural gas to end-use residential, commercial and industrial customers. The new Aspire Energy Express transmission infrastructure represents a capital investment of approximately $10 million and is expected to deliver reliable natural gas to power on-site electricity generation to the new data center in the first half of 2027.