Trump and U.S. senator team up to promote energy and tech investments in Pennsylvania

From left, David McCormick, then the Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate, greets Donald Trump at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on July 31, 2024. (Matt Rourke / AP Photo)

PITTSBURGH — U.S. President Donald Trump and Sen. David McCormick of Pennsylvania touted tens of billions of dollars of energy and technology investments Tuesday as the president travelled to Pittsburgh for a conference with dozens of top executives to promote his energy and technology agenda.

The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, held at Carnegie Mellon University, comes as the state’s political and business leaders are working to forge the city into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and energy.

Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania -- a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 -- is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal and gas industry that the Republican administration has taken steps to bolster.

At the summit, Trump Cabinet officials spoke of the need to produce as much energy as possible -- especially from coal and natural gas -- to beat China in the artificial intelligence race for the sake of economic and national security.

“The AI revolution is upon us,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during a panel discussion. “The Trump administration will not let us lose. We need to do clean, beautiful coal. We need to do natural gas, we need to embrace nuclear, we need to embrace it all because we have the power to do it and if we don’t do it we’re fools.”

Some of the investments on a list released by McCormick’s office were not necessarily brand new, while others were. Some involve massive data center projects, while others involve building power plants, expanding natural gas pipelines, upgrading power plants or improving electricity transmission networks.

Google said it would invest US$25 billion on AI and data center infrastructure over the next two years in PJM’s mid-Atlantic electricity grid, while investment firm Brookfield said it had signed contracts to provide more than $3 billion of power to Google’s data centers from two hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Blackstone said it will spend $25 billion on data centers and power infrastructure in northeastern Pennsylvania, Frontier Group said it would transform the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant in western Pennsylvania into a new natural gas-fired plant and AI cloud computing firm CoreWeave said it will spend more than $6 billion to equip a data center in south central Pennsylvania.

McCormick, a first-term Republican senator who organized the inaugural event, said the summit was meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities.

The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, Bridgewater, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also spoke.

“What’s exciting about this event is it’s a great catalyst for investments and closing deals in the region,” said Jake Loosararian, the founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics.

Administration officials speaking at the summit included White House crypto czar David Sacks, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Lutnick. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also attended.

McCormick credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.

Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called " AI Avenue " that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.

“What’s going on is a rewiring of the economy, of the world over the next 15 years and that takes trillions and trillions and tens of trillions of dollars and it starts with power,” said Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, during a panel discussion.

Pennsylvania has scored big investment wins in recent months, some driven by federal manufacturing policy and others by the ravenous need for electricity from the fast-growing AI business.

Nippon Steel just bought U.S. Steel for almost $15 billion, getting Trump’s approval after pledging to invest billions alone in U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area plants.

Amazon will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania, while the one-time Homer City coal-fired power plant is being turned into the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center campus. Meanwhile, Microsoft says it is spending $1.6 billion to reopen the lone functional nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island under a long-term power supply agreement for its data centres.

------

Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pa.

Seung Min Kim and Marc Levy, The Associated Press