Trump unveils more than $100B in AI, energy investments as part of major push for US to lead innovation over China

PITTSBURGH — President Trump championed more than $100 billion in new private-sector investments in artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure Tuesday — saying AI will lead Pennsylvania back to being an industrial powerhouse to compete with China.

“Today, the Commonwealth is reclaiming its industrial heritage and taking its place at the forefront of the AI technological revolution,” the president said at the energy and AI summit flanked by industry leaders.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping — who Trump referred to as “our friend” with a “great relationship” in passing during his remarks  — has been unleashing a skyrocketing amount of energy in the last decade and working on their own AI models.

“We are way ahead of China,” he stressed in Pittsburgh. “I have to say we’re way ahead of China.”

“I heard somebody say before that, we’re going to try and catch China. We’re not catching them. We’re leading.”

Trump, who won the Rust Belt swing state on Nov. 5 after surviving an assassination attempt last July near Pittsburgh, celebrated more than a dozen corporate pledges to invest in the Keystone State.

“Today’s commitments are ensuring that the future is going to be designed, built, and made right here in Pennsylvania and right here in Pittsburgh and I have to say right here in the United States of America,” Trump said.

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), a former hedge fund CEO, organized the pledges seeking to turn natural gas-rich Pennsylvania into an AI leader, rather than just a power producer for other tech-heavy regions such as northern Virginia.

“I don’t know if you would’ve been around,” Trump told the senator as the audience hushed at the mention of the assassination attempt.

The Inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit was held at Carnegie Mellon University, where investment giant Blackstone unveiled a $25 billion investment to create AI data centers and power plants specifically in Northeast Pennsylvania,.

Google, meanwhile, committed $25 billion to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centers across the US over two years, plus another $3 billion to refurbish two hydroelectric power plants in Pennsylvania to serve regional AI data centers.

The company First Energy pledged $15 billion to boost electrical grid power distribution and the firm Homer City Redevelopment agreed to buy $15 billion of locally pumped natural gas for a 1,000-man power plant in the rural area of western Pennsylvania.

PA Data Center Partners and Powerhouse Data Centers committed to a $15 billion three-campus data center hub near Carlisle in south-central Pennsylvania and AI cloud firm CoreWeave is putting $6 billion into a new data center in Lancaster in the southeast of the state.

PPL Corporation is putting $6.8 billion toward grid capacity improvement, Westinghouse Electric Company is working to build 10 new nuclear power reactors by 2030 and Capital Power is putting $3 billion toward expanding a gas facility, McCormick’s office said.

“Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned to deliver the abundant, affordable energy that growing AI and advanced manufacturing sectors demand,” the senator said.

“We have the skilled workforce to build and operate this critical infrastructure, world-class universities driving innovation, and strategic proximity to over half the country’s population.”

McCormick, who defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. in November, was set to go up on stage at Butler to join Trump on July 13, 2024, but there was an issue with the crowd that prevented him from successfully getting up there, Trump revealed at the event.

Pennsylvania already is a major energy producer due to a boom in fracking for natural gas and has many top colleges that train tech pioneers, including Carnegie Mellon in the west and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, of which both Trump and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are alumni.

McCormick’s push comes as electric providers are in the process of transecting western Maryland with power lines to feed Virginia’s data centers just outside of Washington. 

The senator called the investments an “economic renaissance” for the state which he said will lead to jobs.

The tech investments are aligned with the administration’s goal of being ahead of China on AI.

The president told reporters later after returning from Pennsylvania that he also doesn’t fear AI eliminating jobs.

“You know, we’re building, we’re going to be building, very shortly, hundreds of factories, including AI. We’re building a lot of car factories. They’re all coming in from other countries now in order to avoid paying the tariffs, and we need people working,” Trump said after getting off of Air Force One. 

“So if AI can help us with that, that’s a positive, because we’re not going to have enough workers to take care of it if we don’t create something. So whether it’s robots or whether it’s AI, we need somebody to take care of it.”

Trump signed an executive order in January ordering the government to remove policies that act as barriers to further development of AI.

The business commitments are the latest post-election boon for Pennsylvania. 

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) last month announced Amazon would invest $20 billion to create multiple new Pennsylvania data centers with initial sites east of Pittsburgh and north of Philadelphia — days before Trump approved a $14 billion partnershipbetween Pittsburgh-based US Steel and Nippon Steel to surge production in the state.