Updated July 15, 2025 at 2:11 PM EDT
U.S. Sen. David McCormick kicked off a summit on artificial intelligence and energy Tuesday morning at Carnegie Mellon University, pledging to unveil tens of billions of dollars in investment during the course of the day while staking Pennsylvania's claim on leading the two industries.
"There's no better place than Pennsylvania to lead the next revolution in energy technology and artificial intelligence," said McCormick during his welcoming remarks at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. "Our commonwealth is poised to lead the next era of growth and opportunity."
But he also noted anxiety about competition in the field from China.
"The AI revolution has potential and promise to transform our nation's economic outlook … but also risks for national security," McCormick said. "If the United States does not lead this revolution on our own terms, we will hand control of our infrastructure, our data, our leadership, and our way of life to the Chinese Communist Party."
President Donald Trump is set to speak at the event later in the day. Other attendees are expected to include top White House aides, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
McCormick said the summit is a chance to see "the President's America First agenda at work, but we're not gathered here just to talk. Today, you'll hear companies commit … more than $90 billion to make sure the road to AI and energy dominance runs right through Pennsylvania.
"We're at the crossroads," he said. "These investments and the issues we'll discuss today are of enormous consequence to Pennsylvania [and] critical to the future."
The first of those announcements came at the morning's first panel discussion: a pledge by Blackstone Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray to invest $25 billion in the state.
While Gray said he would make a more formal announcement later in the day, he said the company would support the construction of two data-center projects in the northeastern part of the state, and partner with a state utility to build "a large number" of natural gas-fueled power plants.
The promise of such investments loomed over the event even before it began, though details emerged slowly even as dollar figures spiraled upward on Tuesday morning.
Prior to the summit, national outlets reported that Trump and McCormick would use the summit to announce some $70 billion in undisclosed "AI and energy investments" statewide. By 8:30 a.m. the morning of the summit, McCormick's office issued a release stating that the number had risen to "more than $90 billion in private-sector investments" that would turn Pennsylvania into "a leading hub for energy, artificial intelligence, and innovation."
Gray did not identify a precise location or timetable for the projects. But he said Pennsylvania's access to natural gas deposits gives it a considerable advantage. While building pipelines to transport gas is costly, he said, in Pennsylvania, "You can co-locate the data centers directly next to the source of power. That's really the secret sauce here."
Gray later noted that the United States could see a 40 to 50 percent increase in power use within the next decade — a potential limiting factor for AI's growth. "Unless we get the energy side of this right, we can't pursue this."
But at least early on in the summit, there was little discussion of energy sources other than natural gas, or of climate change — a concern that many green-energy supporters expressed prior to the event.
McCormick himself focused on natural gas and nuclear power during his remarks, and David Sacks, the top White House official focused on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, said that in order to develop AI, "we have to drill, baby, drill and … build, baby, build."
Later, another Trump Administration official portrayed green energy as something akin to a foreign plot.
"The No. 1 in the environmental narrative is China," said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. "China is opening a new coal plant a week and trying to get us to close a coal plant a week. ... They are the leader of solar, because they don't have oil and they don't have natural gas."
Echoing earlier speakers who said that success in AI depended on access to power, Lutnick said: "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."
While Carnegie Mellon University president Farnham Jahanian stressed the importance of investing in education and worker training — "we have to create pathways into this economy that we are creating that's going to bring everybody along," he said — Sacks offered a laissez-faire approach that stressed the importance of Trump's deregulatory agenda.
"We in government have to have an approach of encouraging the private sector," Sacks said.
In general, speakers at the opening panel were upbeat about the prospects ahead. For example, they generally played down concerns voiced recently by Dario Amodei, who leads AI firm Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of the white-collar job force.
"It's really easy to see in a big breakthrough that the horse-and-buggy guys are going to go out of business," said Sacks. "[But] we can't see all the new companies that are going to be created."
The event is taking place at Carnegie Mellon University, a hub of research into artificial intelligence and other advanced technology. Outside the panel discussions taking place in McConomy Auditorium, vendors mingled with attendees. They included familiar firms such as Astrobotic Technology, which seeks to deploy solar-energy capacity on the moon, and lesser-known local companies such as Starline, which makes power distribution systems used in data centers, and Sealion, which uses a polymer coating to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.
Many of the firms have local ties, some to campus itself. Sealion's founder and CEO, Reeja Jayan, is a CMU mechanical engineering professor. The presence of such vendors, alongside representatives from Pittsburgh business groups and universities, gave CMU staff a chance for exposure at a summit where some on campus have complained of being excluded.
While there were repeated nods to the bipartisan consensus supporting AI and energy development, the speakers' list skewed heavily Republican — and decidedly white and male. That was thanks in part to the participation of Trump Administration leaders, who took repeated shots at the policies of former President Joe Biden (whose approach to energy policy was likened to a "crazy train" by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright).
The only Democratic officeholder on stage was Gov. Josh Shapiro, who touted Amazon's recently announced $20 billion investment in eastern Pennsylvania as a sign of his administration's more aggressive approach to development.
"I think really for the first time, Pennsylvania has got it all lined up," Shapiro said during a discussion alongside McCormick and Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman. "We've got resources, reducing taxes, we've got bipartisan will to get this done, and we're showing an ability to move quickly on these deals."
Shapiro said that while he had "profound differences" with Republicans on some issues — such as a recently passed Republican spending plan he warned could decimate Medicaid and food-stamp benefits — "We're finding common ground on energy, we're finding common ground on economic development."
Rachel McDevitt of WESA contributed.