Amazon Invests Historic $20 Billion for Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure in PA.
As published in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 9, 2025 — Chloe Jad
Amazon will invest at least $20 billion to develop artificial intelligence “innovation campuses” across the commonwealth, Gov. Josh Shapiro said Monday.
Luzerne County and Bucks County will be the sites of the first two data center campuses, with other locations still in discussion.
Amazon’s is the largest capital investment in the state’s history, according to Mr. Shapiro.
Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, announced the deal at a construction site in Berwick, Columbia County, just a few miles from where Republican U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick grew up in Bloomsburg. Mr. McCormick said he sees this as indicative of “the Pennsylvania Renaissance,” applauding Mr. Shapiro and emphasizing that the deal “transcends political parties.”
“Pennsylvania has been struggling,” Mr. McCormick said. “We’ve been in decline, losing jobs. And this, I think, is giving people a vision of a Pennsylvania that’ll be growing and prosperous.”
Unemployment statewide rose from 3.8% in January to 3.9% in April of this year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Mr. Shapiro promised that at least 1,250 “high-paying, high-tech” jobs would follow from the deal, requiring labor to build, maintain and operate the campuses.
Joanna Doven, executive director of the AI Strike Team — a group of local leaders working to position Pittsburgh as a global AI hub who set the goal of creating 100,000 tech jobs in the region by 2028 — said she is pleased. The team has been working with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission that connects local, state and federal players to advance regional development, and commissioners throughout Western Pennsylvania “to activate sites for significant AI infrastructure investments.”
“There are many sites that are being brokered as we speak, and I anticipate very large announcements in the near future,” Ms. Doven said, confirming that Western Pa. is in the mix for AI development under the deal.
She said she thinks this is a matter of seizing Pennsylvania’s future, not sitting idly by in the race to claim AI infrastructure.
“We have to be realistic that AI is not going away,” Ms. Doven said. “The life-changing innovations that are being propelled because of it are only going to keep advancing.”
As for what a $20 billion investment will look like on the ground: “a massive amount of pre-construction work,” she said.
Steamfitting, electric, gas and steel trades will all be called to the table to construct the technological behemoth that is a high-computing data center. Cooling technologies are key to tame the heat produced by a data hall full of high-performance computers that can meet AI’s demands. Intricate electrical infrastructure, with backups, ensures that a power outage won’t make screens across the region go dark.
This technology is installed and awaiting computers in Ardent Data Centers, Pittsburgh’s newest data center in Robinson. Ardent is the data center development branch of German company Northern Data Group.
And while Pennsylvania is consistently the largest exporter of electricity in the country, something AI-computing data centers need a lot of, Virginia is home to 576 data centers out of a national total of 3,760, according to the Data Center Map database, making it the largest data center market globally.
Ms. Doven said she wants to bring that exported energy back into the state’s economy, instead of letting other states reap the benefits of Pennsylvania’s abundance in resources.
A 2023 study by the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found that the data center industry would contribute an estimated 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income and $9.1 billion in GDP annually to Virginia — and that “most of these economic benefits derive from the construction phase rather than data centers’ ongoing operations.”
“AI is very physical, and it demands a re-industrialization,” Ms. Doven said. “This equates to jobs, workforce and tax generation. And the governor spoke that loud and clear today, which is a significant AI signal that I believe other hyperscalers and investors will be hearing beyond Amazon.”
Key to Pittsburgh’s success, Ms. Doven’s team found, is that the city has what the AI revolution asks for:
“Steel needs AI,” she said. “AI needs steel.”
Amazon’s investment comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s greenlight of the merger between U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel, with Nippon offering billions to acquire the Pittsburgh-based industry. Mr. McCormick said he got universal support for backing the U.S. Steel-Nippon deal — for him, another component of the state’s renaissance — and that he is “super excited” about Amazon’s investment.
“You got to have speed to be able to build these things,” Mr. McCormick said, “and speed depends on having a labor force that can respond. We’ve got these incredible building trades in Pennsylvania.”
The senator is spearheading a Pittsburgh summit in mid-July that will bring together labor, technology, energy, policy and investor groups, and with it, he said, hopefully a new wave of announcements.
