PITTSBURGH—Flanked by titans of the fossil fuel, tech and finance industries, President Donald Trump on Tuesday hailed $90 billion in private investments aimed at building a massive artificial intelligence hub around Pennsylvania’s natural gas resources.
“This is a really triumphant day for the people of the Commonwealth and for the United States of America,” Trump said. “Today’s commitments are ensuring the future will be designed and built right here in Pennsylvania, right here in Pittsburgh, and I have to say, the United States of America.”
Touted by Trump as the largest private investment in the state’s history, the plan would solidify a market for the abundant natural gas resources that have made Pennsylvania the nation’s No. 2 producer, second only to Texas. It also would support a major expansion of fossil fuel production in defiance of the science showing that the world needs to drive down greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
While corporate chieftains and politicos gathered at Carnegie Mellon University at what was billed as the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, a protest opposing the event and CMU’s decision to host it took place down the street. Hundreds of professors, college students, Pittsburgh residents and activists marched on Forbes Avenue toward the campus, where they were stopped by a line of police in riot gear.
“We the people of Pittsburgh care desperately about climate,” said Tracy Baton, director of Indivisible Pittsburgh and a co-organizer of the protest. “We’re not going back” to the unchecked industrial pollution that plagued Pittsburgh for so many years, she said.
“A lot of us are outraged that Trump thinks he can visit our campus when he is disrupting our research grants and terrorizing our students,” said Carrie McDonough, a chemistry professor at CMU who wore a lab coat to the protest. McDonough studies how environmental pollution affects aquatic ecosystems and human health. She said she and many other faculty members had lost funding as the Trump administration made drastic cuts to federal research grants across the country.
“As far as I can tell the energy and innovation policy they are talking about is building more data centers in western PA,” and fracking more to fuel them, she said. “Which isn’t innovative.”
But Trump’s team—including at least five cabinet secretaries—were on hand to make the case that falling behind in artificial intelligence and fossil energy production were among the greatest risks that the nation faced, not climate change.
“My bet, it’s Russian psyops that’s driving a lot of this whole era of climate extremism,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who also leads Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council. “We should get up every day and thank every person who had anything to do with the technology that drove the shale revolution,” he said, referring to the production of oil and gas through high-volume hydraulic fracturing of shale rock.
Burgum said the energy from fossil fuels released from shale would save the nation from “losing the AI arms race,” which the Trump administration viewed as an existential threat.
“Don’t call them data centers, please,” Burgum said. “It’s intelligence manufacturing. You take electricity, you directly turn it into intelligence. That intelligence is the base productivity gain for every industry.”
Crossroads for Two Revolutions
At least 15 corporate chief executives attended the summit, which was organized by Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), a former hedge fund manager now serving his first term in Congress after a razor-thin victory in November.
“There is an incredibly significant revolution going on in energy and in artificial intelligence,” McCormick said. “And the crossroads for those two revolutions is Pennsylvania.”
McCormick and Trump recalled it was only a year ago that both were together on the campaign trail about 35 miles north in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump narrowly avoided an assassination attempt.
“Twelve months later, look at what we have,” Trump said. “We have the hottest country, and we’re going to keep it that way.”
Among the CEOs on hand were ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods, BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Bechtel’s Brendan Bechtel. Google and Amazon also sent high-ranking corporate officers, with the tech giants responsible for two of the biggest deals highlighted at the summit.
Amazon announced last month it plans to invest at least $20 billion in building data centers for AI and cloud computing in Pennsylvania. Google said Tuesday it would be investing $25 billion. A $15 billion deal was struck between EQT Corporation and the Homer City Redevelopment Authority to provide natural gas to fuel what will be the nation’s largest natural gas plant, being built to fuel an AI and high-performance computing center on the site of what was once the state’s largest coal power plant. Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, announced it will invest more than $25 billion to build out digital and energy infrastructure in the state.
“By co-locating data centers next to the natural gas, we eliminate the enormous cost and time delays with these projects, which makes us super bullish on this state,” said Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, who sat at Trump’s side at a U-shaped conference table of cabinet members and executives set up in CMU’s Wiegand Gym.
There were a handful of non-fossil fuel announcements of the day. Google and Brookfield Asset Management unveiled what they said was the world’s largest corporate clean power deal for hydroelectricity. Under the agreement, Google would be able to procure up to 3,000 megawatts of hydropower—the equivalent of one and a half Hoover Dams—from hydro projects across the United States that will be relicensed, overhauled or upgraded by Brookfield, starting with the $3 billion modernization of two older dams on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. And Westinghouse, headquartered near Pittsburgh, said it expects 15,000 new jobs in southwestern Pennsylvania due to its plan to have 10 new large nuclear reactors under construction across the country by 2030.
Shapiro Embraces Pro-Business Role
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, also attended, ignoring local environmentalists’ opposition to his participation and laying some bipartisan claim to the Trump administration’s plans for economic development in one of the nation’s most politically important swing states. Shapiro is widely seen as a potential standard-bearer for the Democratic party in the future, but his support of the fracking industry has cut against him with some of the party’s more progressive voters.
Environmentalists in Pennsylvania spoke out against McCormick’s summit and Shapiro’s involvement in it. A letter sent to Shapiro criticizing his attendance was signed by more than 25 environmental organizations in the state. “It is really a tripling down on dirty fossil fuels for the U.S.,” said Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum, a letter signee, of the event. Van Rossum decried the pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and public health impacts of fracking and said Shapiro’s presence was an endorsement of Trump’s fossil fuel friendly energy policies. “This is really a perilous path that we are on towards a devastating future for Pennsylvania,” she said.
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Karen Feridun, an environmental activist for the Better Path Coalition who organized the letter to Shapiro, said she was disappointed that CMU had agreed to host the event. She too was worried about what the high-powered list of attendees at the summit portended for Pennsylvania’s future. “It’s pretty clear that Pennsylvania is going to be inundated with data centers and dirty energy projects,” she said. “It’s very concerning that not only is this happening, but that our governor is attending.”
Shapiro appeared on a panel alongside McCormick, embracing a role as a pro-business politician who can work with Republicans. He said tax cuts and faster action in getting energy projects approved in Pennsylvania under his administration had helped make the state more friendly for economic development.
“Think about Pennsylvania,” he said. “We have always been at the intersection of revolution and opportunity. … We are now at the next phase of this revolution, a revolution that I think has … incredible national security risks and opportunity to it as well. AI will help us usher in the next revolution.”
Pennsylvania, the state where the world’s first successful commercial oil well was drilled in 1859 and a major producer of coal in the 19th century, spent decades as a manufacturing hub of the Industrial Revolution and later, the nation’s post-war industrial expansion. Philadelphia was once known as the “Workshop of the World” for its manufacturing power, and Pittsburgh is still called “Steel City” today, a nod to the city’s long history of steelmaking and industry. But beginning in the 1970s, Pennsylvania’s economy was hard hit by successive economic shocks, including foreign competition and a migration of manufacturing to the South and abroad.
In the early 2000s, the energy industry brought the promise of an economic boom in Pennsylvania with the advent of fracking technology. Fracking made it possible to extract natural gas locked in a massive geological formation that bisects Pennsylvania—the Marcellus Shale. Practically overnight, estimates of the state’s recoverable gas reserves tripled, and since the first well was drilled in 2004, natural gas has grown into a major industry in the state. The gas industry’s own studies say that it has generated 123,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, with $23.4 billion of impact on the state’s GDP in 2022—3 percent of that year’s total.
Other studies have cast doubt on the economic benefits of the fracking boom for the region. The Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit research center focused on Appalachia, found that between 2008 and 2019—peak years for the industry’s growth—the fracking region in Pennsylvania and neighboring states fell behind the rest of the country in job growth, population growth and share of national income.
Support for fracking in Pennsylvania is highly partisan, and the industry remains divisive. A growing body of scientific research has found connections between living near fracking operations and health problems such as asthma, poor infant health, leukemia, lymphoma, sinus symptoms, increased risk of hospitalization, lower birth weights and migraines.
Pennsylvania’s grand jury report on fracking, led by then attorney general Shapiro, found that the state had failed to “properly protect the health, safety and welfare of its citizens” from fracking, and featured the harrowing testimony of residents who had suffered symptoms like rashes, nosebleeds, lethargy and ulcers while living near fracking infrastructure.
Fracking has also been linked to environmental problems like air and water pollution, and though natural gas, when burned for electricity, emits fewer greenhouse gases than coal, it is still a significant contributor to global warming.
Three quarters of the natural gas produced in Pennsylvania is shipped out of the state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the industry has sought greater build-out of pipelines to move more product to liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities, particularly on the Gulf Coast.
One major natural gas customer came online near Pittsburgh in 2022: the state’s first ethane cracker, a huge Shell petrochemical complex for manufacturing plastic. The Shell plant was supposed to mark the beginning of an “Appalachian energy and petrochemical renaissance,” a vision for the region from Trump’s first term that has largely not come to pass.
Natural gas companies now view data centers and LNG exports, fed by Pennsylvania’s fracking wells, as a new opportunity to grow their business at a time when the cost to drill is going up and the productivity of each new well is going down.
River Sepinuck, an engineering student at CMU and a member of the CMU College Democrats, said he understood Shapiro’s decision to attend the summit but he hoped the governor would take a public stance against Trump. Sepinuck said he and other student protestors “want it to be known that we don’t support Trump.”
“We don’t want AI to be powered by coal and oil and natural gas. We want this technology that’s going to be used to build the future, to be used to build a better future, not just one where you can get an extra yacht if you’re a CEO,” he said. “We are sick and tired of letting the worst people on Earth tell us what our future is going to look like.”
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Marianne Lavelle
Bureau Chief, Washington, D.C.
Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.
Kiley Bense
Reporter, Pennsylvania
Kiley Bense covers climate change and the environment with a focus on Pennsylvania, politics, energy, and public health. She has reported on the effects of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, the expansion of the American plastics industry, and the intersection of climate change and culture. Her previous work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Believer, and Sierra Magazine, and she holds master’s degrees in journalism and creative writing from Columbia University. She is based in Pennsylvania.
