President Trump visited Pittsburgh on Tuesday to praise companies for investing more than $90 billion in data centers and other energy projects in Pennsylvania, aimed at accelerating the development of artificial intelligence.
“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,” Mr. Trump said at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University.
The event was organized by Senator David McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, who brought together Trump administration officials and executives from technology and fossil fuel companies, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, ExxonMobil and Westinghouse.
At the event, the private equity firm Blackstone announced that it would invest $25 billion in new data centers and energy infrastructure, including natural gas power plants. Google said it would invest another $25 billion in data centers and announced a separate $3 billion plan to upgrade two of Pennsylvania’s existing hydroelectric dams to produce more electricity. CoreWeave, an A.I. cloud company, said it would invest $6 billion in a large data center near Lancaster, Pa.
Trump administration officials have said that winning the artificial intelligence race with China is a top priority. Officials have also said they want to make it easier to approve new natural gas and nuclear power plants to supply the enormous quantities of electricity needed to supply data centers. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” saying the country did not have enough power to meet its growing needs for A.I. and ordering agencies to roll back environmental rules.
Critics have said the Trump administration, by cutting research funding and gutting scientific agencies, has made it easier for China to catch up to the United States in the A.I. race. On Monday, the chipmaker Nvidia also said that the administration had lifted restrictions on selling certain types of A.I. chips to China.
At the event in Pennsylvania, some executives said the state was an attractive place for artificial intelligence development because of its cheap natural gas. While companies in the region have managed to extract large amounts of gas from underground shale rock over the years through fracking, there often are not enough pipelines to ship all that gas to other states.
Jon Gray, the president of Blackstone, said that his company would look at teaming up with utilities and developers to build data centers closer to new gas plants. “What makes us so excited about this area is that you can co-locate the data centers next to the source of power,” he said.
Environmentalists have criticized the Trump administration’s plans to bypass environmental reviews and expand the use of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal, saying that doing so will worsen air pollution and climate change.
At the summit, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dismissed those concerns. “I mean, really, this administration had identified early that there are two existential threats, and neither one of them is climate change,” he said. “One is Iran getting a nuclear weapon. And then two is losing the A.I. arms race.”
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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