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Trump touts $92bn in investments in AI, energy

Trump touts $92bn in investments in AI, energy

Washington, 15 July (Argus) — President Donald Trump said today his administration would fast-track permitting and take other steps to support billions of dollars in recently announced investments in Pennsylvania tied to artificial intelligence and energy production. Trump said an estimated $92bn in investments announced Tuesday would ensure the future will be "designed, built and made right here in Pennsylvania." The investments include data centers to support artificial intelligence, gas-fired power plants, nuclear power plants, pipeline upgrades, and natural gas supply agreements, although many of the projects announced appear to be early in development. "We're building a future where American workers will forge the steel, produce the energy, build the factories," Trump said at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. Among the projects are plans to invest billions of dollars on the redevelopment of retired coal plants into sites that would host new gas-fired plants that would be co-located with data centers. Technology firms hope that developing data centers next to power plants will sidestep the years-long wait that would be required to upgrade the grid to supply their facilities with electricity. "You're going to build your own electric factory, and you're gonna make your own electricity," Trump said. "You can sell it back into the grid, you'll even make money from the electric business." Those projects include a plan by the firm Frontier Group to develop the site of the retired 2.7GW Bruce Mansfield coal plant into a "significantly larger" gas plant that would also host a "prospective" data center. Investment firm Knighthead Capital Management said it plans to repurpose the retired Homer City coal-fired power plant into a data center that will include 4.4GW in gas-fired power generation. Other projects will upgrade existing power plants. The firm Capital Power said it will spend $3bn over the next decade to expand a gas plant in Shamokin Dam, Pennsylvania. Google said it has reached a $3bn agreement for electricity from two hydropower facilities in Pennsylvania. Constellation Energy said it was investing $2.4bn to upgrade its Limerick nuclear power plant. Trump said he was directing his administration to issue permits quickly for power plants proposed to supply electricity for data centers, with an apparent joke that the world's largest power plant would obtain environmental permits in "about a week" and about two weeks for nuclear plants. "These are permits that would have taken you literally 10 years to get," Trump said. "It's crazy all over the country, but we're freeing it up." The Trump administration has argued that making the US the leader in AI is one of its highest priorities. US interior secretary Doug Burgum said the administration determined early on that "losing the AI arms race" to China would be an "existential threat" such that it justified a declaration of an "energy emergency" to increase domestic energy production. "Energy dominance means prosperity at home, it means peace abroad, it's how we end wars, it's how we build and advance every industry we have," Burgum said. The administration has cited its support for AI to justify slowing the development of wind and solar projects they see as incompatible with the industry's demand for baseload power. Trump said wind "doesn't work" for data centers, and Burgum said he was "completely opposed to having unreliable, unaffordable intermittent energy as our future." Other administration officials have touted efforts to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. "This administration, we're going to make it much, much easier to build new power plants, new infrastructure, even transmission lines, natural gas pipelines," US energy secretary Chris Wright said during an interview with CNBC on the sidelines of the summit. By Chris Knight Send comments and request more information at feedback@argusmedia.com Copyright © 2025. Argus Media group . All rights reserved.