President Donald Trump headlined an event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh this week, promoting the growth of artificial intelligence in Pennsylvania. The Energy and Innovation Summit was organized by U.S. Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.
In a crowded gymnasium filled with executives from the oil and gas, tech, and finance industries, Trump announced more than $92 billion of investments in the state.
“We’re back in Pittsburgh to announce the largest package of investments in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier was there as well and joined host Kara Holsopple to discuss what happened.
LISTEN to the conversation
Kara Holsopple: Reid, explain what this summit was and how it came about.
Reid Frazier: The summit was organized and hosted by McCormick, a Republican and former finance executive who was first elected to the Senate in 2024. The event brought together political leaders like McCormick, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and President Trump, and many of Trump’s cabinet members. They were joined by executives in the business world, like Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, the president and chief investment officer of Google, Ruth Porat, and Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Basically, there were a lot of very rich, powerful people in one room. They were there to talk about and hype the oncoming rush for artificial intelligence, which we and other outlets have reported is going to need a lot of electricity to power the advanced computing that goes into it.
Kara Holsopple: So what were the announced investments?
Reid Frazier: From the energy side, almost all of it was devoted to natural gas and infrastructure that would support that. However, Google did announce that it was investing in hydropower in Pennsylvania and there were nuclear power projects announced as well. There were power projects announced in Northeast Pennsylvania (Blackstone, an investment firm helmed by billionaire Jon Gray, a conference attendee, announced a $25 Billion commitment to data centers and natural gas power infrastructure in Northeast Pennsylvania). Frontier Group announced the shuttered Bruce Mansfield power plant in Beaver County, which was formerly a coal plant, would be converted into a natural gas plant. Westinghouse, headquartered in Pittsburgh, says it’s working to build 10 new large nuclear power plant reactors in southwest Pennsylvania. There were also announcements for lots of pipelines, lots of transmission lines, and of course, lots of data centers. Those (data centers) are mostly in the eastern part of the state.
Sen. McCormick touted all of this as a new economic “renaissance” for the state brought on by AI.
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Sen. McCormick: These investments are a testament to Pennsylvania’s unique resources. Unbelievable natural gas reserves, abundant fresh water, a massive installed base of nuclear power, incredible tech.
Reid Frazier: Some of the projects had previously been announced, but the numbers are big, the money is big, but there is not a lot of detail right now about when and how these projects will be built.
Kara Holsopple: Talk about some of the main themes that were discussed. What were they?
Reid Frazier: There was an overarching theme of the need to build more electricity to power these AI data centers. These data centers are essentially big warehouses filled with huge computers. For artificial intelligence applications, they need an incredible amount of electricity, so much so that there’s a lot of talk that they will strain the grid and cause electricity prices to rise. There is a scramble right now to find more electricity to power all this computing that AI needs.
There was also a lot of talk about using Pennsylvania’s natural gas for this purpose. Pennsylvania is the second-largest natural gas-producing state in the country. It sits on top of the biggest gas reserve in the country, the Marcella Shale. There was also a lot of talk about the need for more skilled workers to build all these data centers and pipelines and gas power plants.
And there was a of discussion about why AI was important in terms of the U.S.’s competition with China. There was a lot of talk about how there is an artificial intelligence race with China and about how important it is for us to be ahead of China in this technology.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, talked about AI helping us prevent the next 9/11.
Amodei: The ability to find a needle in a haystack, right, the next September 11th or whatever, AI will have a much greater ability to process through a large amount of data and draw the connections much better than people can.
Reid Frazier: Trump and his various cabinet secretaries–he had a lot of his cabinet there (including the secretaries of the departments of Commerce, Energy, and Interior)– talked about how he’s cut back on environmental rules and regulations, cut taxes, and cut support for clean energy, which he has called a ‘scam’. And a lot of the business leaders there commended the Trump administration for doing this and said that, basically, because of all of these anti-regulatory moves, it’s going to be easier for America to build more of this AI infrastructure.
But there was also a lot of discussion about the idea that this needs to go further, that we need to make it easier to permit projects in the U.S. This is not a new conversation, but is now just being applied to artificial intelligence.
Kara Holsopple: I think I already know the answer to this, but what wasn’t discussed at the event? Well, Climate change was not really discussed. There are a lot of studies out there that are saying that all this electricity to power AI is going to come from fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.
Really, the only person who even gestured at it was Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, surprisingly, who talked about the need to reduce emissions, including using technologies like carbon capture, which still isn’t very widely used, but is something that companies like ExxonMobil are starting to do at scale.
Even Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who has talked about climate change in the past as a big problem, didn’t mention it. He talked about the economic possibilities that AI and this build-out will have for the state.
Gov. Shapiro: This is a global race for both energy dominance and AI dominance. And we need homegrown Pennsylvanians to be doing this work and we need investment from all across the country and all across the globe.
Reid Frazier: There was also not a lot of discussion about the impact on the workforce. Will AI reduce the number of jobs available in the workforce? David Sachs, Trump’s AI czar, said it may lead to some job loss, but that it will also lead to new opportunities for work. But that aspect of AI wasn’t really discussed much.
Kara Holsopple: This was a controversial event for Carnegie Mellon to host. Can you talk a little bit about why?
Reid Frazier: A letter signed by over 30 faculty at Carnegie Mellon objected to the university hosting it, mainly because Trump was involved. He was the headliner of the event. Trump slashed federal funding for science, including science that’s being done at Carnegie Mellon. He’s revoked student visas of foreign students, including students at Carnegie Mellon, and attacked transgender rights. Those were the main reasons that the faculty who signed the letter opposed the summit. We could also add in that the administration is hostile to clean energy; it just succeeded in wiping out the most powerful subsidies we’ve had for wind and solar in the president’s recent budget megabill. And the president just makes false claims, like the idea that he put out at the conference that China doesn’t have a lot of windmills. That’s false. China is leading the world in wind farms and wind energy. So these faculty members really objected to Trump being involved in the event. And as expected, there were groups protesting the event outside the summit.
