WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump made the trip to Pittsburgh on Tuesday to discuss energy and artificial intelligence at a summit put on by Pennsylvania’s Republican Sen. Dave McCormick and showcase billions of dollars in investments from companies in those industries.
Taking part in the roundtable-style event with McCormick, business executives and a handful of Cabinet officials, Trump referred to the total $92 billion that 20 companies plan to spend as part of the announcement as the “largest package of investments in the history” of the state.
“This is a really triumphant day for the people of the commonwealth and the United States of America,” Trump declared, going on to tout what his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said was $16 trillion in “investment dollars coming into America” amid the president’s return to office.
The first-term senator’s inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit held at Carnegie Mellon University brought together CEOs from well-established companies like Amazon Web Services, Blackstone and ExxonMobil as well as ones local to the area. McCormick said the goal was to gather top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors, and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities.
Trump said the investments highlighted on Tuesday include more than $56 billion in new energy infrastructure and $36 billion in new data center projects, while teasing that additional announcements will come in the weeks ahead.
As part of the package of investments, Google pledged to spend $25 billion on AI and data center infrastructure over the next two years in PJM’s mid-Atlantic electricity grid. 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.
Pennsylvania – a presidential battleground state that Trump noted “warms my heart” – is a major player in the president’s goal of U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market.
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.
“We believe America’s destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in technology and that includes being the world’s number one superpower in artificial intelligence,” Trump said. “And we are way ahead of China.”
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.