Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said artificial intelligence data power centers need abundant energy, workforce, and support from local universities. Pennsylvania is well positioned to provide all of these.
“This is the hub of where all of that happens,” Lutnick said in an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner.
Lutnick was one of hundreds of prominent stakeholders in energy, government, the private sector, and the trades who gathered on Tuesday for the Inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA). The junior senator started the event by announcing nearly $100 billion in new investments in energy and innovation in the state. The bipartisan event included Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), and a roundtable event with President Donald Trump.
Lutnick said the billion-dollar investments would create jobs and make Pennsylvania a leader in innovation and energy, stressing that reliable, abundant energy is what is needed to fuel the AI revolution.
“People think of a chip, they think of an Apple chip that goes on the phone. These AI data center chips are the size of a refrigerator, and they weigh more than a refrigerator,” Lutnick said of the historic amount of energy required to keep the data centers going.
“These are huge chips that just process vast amounts of data. Everything’s a decision tree. And they’ll do a trillion decisions in order to understand what you’re saying and how to communicate with you. So that will empower all sorts of things. It’ll empower robots to be able to do automated building,” he said.
The AI industry is going to need thousands of people to operate these facilities, Lutnick said.
“Think about the air conditioning systems alone,” he said. “It’s a closed loop. It’s the coolest air conditioning system in the world. They need an HVAC specialist as well as welders, boilermakers, steamfitters, carpenters, and pipefitters. And these are not pipefitters and carpenters like the old school. These are the coolest pipe fitters and carpenters in the world.”
Lutnick said, “The guys who work in these plants will go home, saying, ‘Let me show you a picture of what I worked on today,’ because they will have worked on the most sophisticated, amazing modern systems. I mean, they just require so much. And the three energy components that feed them are natural gas, nuclear, and, to a lesser extent but still very important, coal.”
SHAPIRO AND MCCORMICK PREACH UNITY AT PENNSYLVANIA ENERGY SUMMIT
Lutnick said that years ago, Pennsylvania mills were built right beside the coal-fired power plants to fuel the making of the steel. It is the same concept happening again, in which you have two Amazon AI data innovation campuses being built beside their natural gas and nuclear power sources in Luzerne and Bucks County in eastern Pennsylvania. Construction has already started at the Homer City AI data center located right beside a former coal-fired power plant being turned into a natural gas power plant.
“Welcome to the AI revolution, and what it does for America is that it enables automation to do the things that we can’t do,” he said.