President Donald Trump hailed billions of dollars in new investment in energy and technology innovation at an event in Pennsylvania Tuesday, convened amid Pittsburgh's plans to become an AI and tech hotspot.
The summit brought together President Trump, lawmakers and executives from dozens of companies that are seeking to build new data centers and particularly energy infrastructure in the region.
Speaking at a roundtable during the summit, President Trump said the investments were part of a move toward "a true golden age for America," driven by investment and policy to support coal and gas industries as energy-hungry AI develops.
“China and other countries are racing to catch up to America on AI, and we’re not going to let them do it," the president said.
The "AI revolution," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, needs energy to support its growth.
"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.”
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The summit included representatives from Blackstone, Bridgewater, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil, as well as leaders from local Pennsylvania businesses.
Google plans to invest $25 billion across two years, in part to beef up the mid-Atlantic grid to better serve energy-hungry AI and data center applications. A project by Frontier Group plans to refurbish an old coal-fired power plant to use natural gas, and investment firm Blackstone plans to spend $25 billion on new data centers and natural gas power plants in northern Pennsylvania.
