US President Donald Trump has underlined his government’s ambition that the US should remain a global leader in AI development for years to come by pledging to fast-track construction of data centres and gas-fired power stations to supply them.
Speaking at an event held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Trump said he intended to instruct government departments to issue permits rapidly for power plants supplying electricity for data centres. He also lauded AI-related investments estimated to be worth over $90bn in the state of Pennsylvania alone.
“We’re here today because we believe that America’s destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in every technology, and that includes being the world’s number one superpower in artificial intelligence,” Trump said at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on 15 July.
The event attracted CEOs from high-profile technology, hydrocarbons and investment firms including ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods, Blackrock’s Larry Fink, and Khaldoon Al-Mubarak of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala. Executives from Amazon Web Services, Google, Bechtel and Westinghouse were also among the attendees.
The US administration is concerned that the country could lose out to China in the race to develop cutting-edge AI processes, if heavy investment is not made in data centre capacity and the massive ramp up in energy infrastructure needed to supply it.
Funding outlined at the event included $25bn of new investment in data centres by Google and $25bn of investment in data centres and associated energy infrastructure by private equity giant Blackstone. Both Frontier Group and Knighthead Capital Management said they would convert former coal plants into gas plants to cater for the forecast extra power demand. Capital Power said it would invest $3bn in the expansion of an existing gas plant.
Meanwhile, Google said it had signed a $3bn agreement to take power from two of Pennsylvania’s existing hydroelectric dams, while Constellation Energy said it would invest $2.4bn to upgrade its Limerick nuclear power plant to help meet demand from data centres.
The Trump administration says gas and nuclear power need to form the backbone of US power grid expansion, because the intermittency of wind and solar power make them unsuitable for supplying on-all-the-time data centres.
That does not chime entirely with the actions of the big firms funding the data centres. In a recent report, the International Energy Agency said technology companies had told the agency their priority was to have secure 24/7 electricity supply using low emissions technologies.
Microsoft said in 2024 it had contracted to buy nearly 20 gigawatts of renewable energy in 21 countries to supply its facilities, while its CEO Satya Nadella has said using renewable energy to power AI would help cut the cost of its development.
Google is also investing heavily in renewables, with plans to build data centres adjacent to wind and solar farms. Amazon has been one of the world’s largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy over recent years.
However, the development of gas-fired power infrastructure to support data centres would be a boon for shale gas producers in Pennsylvania. While the state is the country’s second largest gas producer after Texas, accounting for around a fifth of national production, it accounted for less than 6% of US consumption in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
That means most of Pennsylvania’s gas needs to be piped, expensively, to other parts of the country, so building new centres of demand would help the industry’s economics in the state.
Research funding concerns
Concerns have been expressed that, while more money is being ploughed into expanding AI processing capacity, the pioneering research on which the tech industry will depend to stay competitive is being neglected.
Data published in July by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggested that President Turmp’s proposed budget cuts would reduce federal spending on research and development (R&D) to $154bn in fiscal year 2026 from $198bn in the previous year, a fall of 22%. Additionally, federal spending on applied research would fall by 38%, that on basic research by 34%, and that on R&D facilities by 33%.
Toby Smith, Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Public Policy at the Association of American Universities told the New York Times that AAAS’s analysis showed that the Trump administration’s budget would, if adopted, “essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation”.
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