HARRISBURG, Pa. — Gov. Josh Shapiro was not in a conciliatory mood.
“We have a long history in Pennsylvania of industry running roughshod over our communities to make a buck,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said in a speech, his voice rising with anger. “That stops with me.”
It was Aug. 18, and he was holding an executive order he was about to sign that would limit data center development. The governor, who is up for reelection in November, said speculative proposals to build data centers had swamped Pennsylvania. He said many of the projects were “led by developers who have no regard for local communities.”
He called them “predatory” developers. Then he made it personal: “We will not be bullied by developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these Big Tech companies.”
“Today, I’m formally putting them on notice.”
More than a year earlier, Shapiro, a potential 2028 presidential candidate who had made Kamala Harris’s shortlist to be her running mate, felt much differently.
In June 2025, Shapiro stood in Berwick, a Susquehanna River town in Columbia County, and declared his state “all in on AI.” He welcomed $20 billion from Amazon for data centers and other related projects, the largest private investment in Pennsylvania history. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
This August, he went the other way. He did not tap the brakes. He stood on them.
The turn drew national notice and was a deft display of political athleticism. Shapiro took the hottest controversy in Pennsylvania — data centers sparking fierce local pushback and summer-long attacks from his Republican opponent — and turned it into a podium, a signing ceremony and a message that he was on the side of the people.
But it left the men and women building those projects asking a different question.
Nowhere in the speech did he name a single developer doing it right.
That omission is not a small thing for this governor. Shapiro’s political identity is built on the refusal to condemn a whole sector when the problem is a subset of it. Shapiro has made a career out of splitting hard issues down the middle. With the data center order, he abandoned that principle. Rank-and-file union members heard him categorize all developers of data centers as the worst of the industry. Within hours, they were asking one another what was going on with the guy who always had their back.
Shawn Steffee was among them. The business agent for Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh said he backs Shapiro — without hedging. “We all support him,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here and lie to you. The building trades support him. Every one of us supports Gov. Shapiro. He’s an advocate of the building trades.”
But Steffee, who has spent the past several months watching his members go back to work at data center sites where coal used to be the reason anyone had a job at all, also believes the governor got the framing wrong.
“Not everybody’s a predator,” he said. “They’re investors, and they want to invest, and I think we need to have guardrails, and we do need to be more transparent with the communities they’re going in. And I think we can do that.”
Pressed on whether a blanket characterization hurts his members, Steffee did not equivocate. “It doesn’t help us,” he said. “We want them to do the right thing. We want them to build it the right way. We want them to come in and take care of the communities they want to build it in.”
Then he named the project the governor never mentioned: the massive Homer City Generation Site Redevelopment. Its developers, Steffee said, are not predators.
“They’ve crossed every t, dotted every i that they needed to pick up these permits,” he said. “And as far as I’m concerned, they’ve done everything the right way and done everything that’s been asked of them by the state of Pennsylvania to move forward with their project.”
Steffee is not commenting at a distance from Homer City. He lives there. So do generations of his family. He also hunts and fishes there, so getting it right is personal.
Homer City was where the largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania once stood for half a century, before it was decommissioned. Now it’s destined to become the nation’s biggest natural gas power plant built to supply electricity to multiple large data centers as well as power to thousands of homes.
At a visit in early September to the 3,200-acre site, the project’s workforce had surpassed 1,800 tradespeople, drawn from local unions, up from 1,000 in March toward an expected peak of 10,000 construction jobs and roughly 1,000 permanent positions. The plant had been paying about $750,000 a year in property taxes, roughly 4 percent of the local school district’s $20 million budget.
Steffee believes that data center opposition has scrambled the usual alignments and that the industry has lost an argument it should have won easily. “Who would ever have thought that the far right and the far left would agree on something of this magnitude?” he said.
“The public perception of these is so terrible, and I don’t know how we got there when it’s something that every one of us is going to need to use every day, and we’re using it right now,” he said. “I just don’t understand why this has become such a bad perception.”
Then he concedes he does: “It’s politics.”
Mike Mikus, a western Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, said of course it’s political. “Fairly or unfairly to the industry, the tone Shapiro used when he issued the executive order is where the average voter is at this moment,” Mikus said. “There is a lot of anger and mistrust pointed at the industry.” Polling reveals overwhelming opposition to data centers over concerns such as water usage, higher utility costs and noise pollution.
Mikus said in any other year this might have cost Shapiro votes. “I don’t think he loses many voters, and he is actually able to take advantage of the current environment to take some risks with very little downside,” Mikus said.
The public polling supports him. A New York Times-Philadelphia Inquirer-Siena University poll conducted the week of the executive order showed that 55 percent of likely voters supported Shapiro while 39 percent backed his opponent, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity (R).
A month after Shapiro issued the order, he spoke at an AI conference at Bakery Square in Pittsburgh’s East End. Investors and technocrats filled the room along with politicians, union officials and university researchers. They gathered in a converted industrial building in a city that has spent a decade rehearsing for this moment.
The case for the region is not speculative. The workforce is here, the natural resources are abundant, and university incubators keep producing the companies that need both. The coal and steel industries that built Pittsburgh ran on railroad tracks and the oil that came out of the ground. What the city is building now runs on data centers and natural gas. It is the same proposition, the same geography, a different superhighway. It is also, precisely, the constituency Shapiro had spent August putting on notice.
What he delivered to that same audience last month at the AI conference was an entirely different speech — measured, layered and careful to distribute credit. He paused to say, “I want to be clear: I am not a doomer.”
He aimed the hardest language not at developers but at D.C., telling the audience that leaders in the federal government have refused to enact guardrails for artificial intelligence “whether out of willful ignorance or personal greed.”
His policy had not changed. The posture was softening — at least toward AI. In our interview following that speech, I asked him about his characterization of the industry as predators. Shapiro’s response was a quibble over meaning: “I said the developers,” he insisted — and not the AI industry.
Shapiro said his posture toward data centers began changing when he and his team reviewed 100 related state projects. He said about 10 percent of them were working with local residents, enjoyed community support and were actually generating power. He said the other projects were run by predatory developers who did not have an end user and had no prospect of ever building their data center. “And so the 90 percent of the projects were making the most noise, wreaking the most havoc, and frankly aren’t the kind of projects we want in Pennsylvania,” he said.
Asked directly whether he had been angry during his August speech, Shapiro rejected the word and then supplied the emotion anyway.
“I think because I feel the anger that exists in communities where parents feel like the place where they saved up to buy a home and raise their kids was being overtaken by developers who didn’t have their best interests in mind,” he said. “And yep, maybe that made me angry on their behalf. And so I wanted to be able to stand up and put clear guardrails in place.”
His instinct under pressure was to reach for the coalition. The order, he noted, has been endorsed by Sean McGarvey, the powerful president of North America’s Building Trades Unions.
Shapiro eventually concedes that good-faith developers are at the Homer City campus, something that earns a broad smile from Steffee, exhausted by the politics. “I don’t care if you have a D, or an R or an I after your name,” Steffee said. “All I care about are the jobs.”
As governor of a critical battleground state, whatever Shapiro does usually makes national news. What many do not realize is that he had told me that he and his family seriously considered not running for reelection this year.
That hesitation came after an arsonist attempted to kill Shapiro and his family in April 2025 by firebombing the governor’s residence, setting the home ablaze while Shapiro, his wife Lori, their four children, other family members and guests escaped.
“We had a long talk about whether we wanted to keep doing this in the face of that kind of attack and that kind of threat,” Shapiro said in an earlier interview.
What he wouldn’t say is whether he is running for president in 2028. He is more forthcoming about his hopes for helping Democrats win downballot races in the midterms. His picks for candidates for state legislative positions and for four U.S. House seats in swing districts are almost all in his mold — conventional Democrats.
Mikus explained this was done with an eye toward the future: “You win Pennsylvania handily, and you have coattails, you are telling not just your party but the country you have the chops to run for president in the state Democrats have to win to win the presidency.”
Presented with that argument, Shapiro shifted it into a statement of party purpose.
“I have a responsibility to move my party in a direction where we can both win in the toughest swing state in the country and other tough swing states,” he said. “And then most importantly, because this is why I’m in this business: govern effectively and govern in ways that actually make people’s lives better.”
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