State Legislators are Pushing for Artificial Intelligence Companies to Take Root in PA.
As published in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 4, 2025 — Chloe Jad
If Pennsylvania wants to become a global hub for artificial intelligence, state players have to get the timing right.
The Keystone State is competing with the rest of the country, and the world, in the race to house critical AI infrastructure and claim the jobs that come with it. It’s a race that state Sen. Greg Rothman, R-Cumberland, and other local legislators are trying to win.
Mr. Rothman sees this as part of a much larger picture to change the demographics of an aging state. Jobs, he said, are a bipartisan issue.
“In order to attract young people, we need to attract jobs, and good family-sustaining jobs,” Mr. Rothman said.
He said he is focused on slashing bureaucratic red tape and — in a nod to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s slogan — acting “at the speed of business.” And so on Monday, Mr. Rothman issued a memo seeking co-sponsorship from fellow state senators to establish a “Commonwealth Opportunity Zone” to expedite approvals for development.
Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery, and majority chair of the House Communications and Technology Committee, is drafting a similar memo to mirror support in the House.
“We’re competing with the world,” Mr. Ciresi said, “so the faster we can do this, the better.”
Mr. Rothman’s memo envisions the “COZ” as a statewide “regulatory sandbox” for AI companies, data centers, and emerging tech to play in. It would enable businesses and state agencies to collaborate seamlessly, Mr. Rothman said, which would eliminate inefficiencies that don’t seem to “serve any other purpose than to delay.”
As the second-largest natural gas producer in the country, second only to Texas, Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned to take on an AI industrial revolution, officials said.
“We are in the midst of a massive re-industrialization and economic shift, and Pennsylvania stands to be an outsized beneficiary of this shift because of our historical strengths in manufacturing and workforce,” said Joanna Doven, executive director of AI Strike Team, a task force of local leaders that has set the goal of creating 100,000 tech jobs in the region by 2028.
Her group is trying to coordinate statewide organizations and resources to create a global AI hub in Pittsburgh. On Sunday, the team released a first-of-its-kind study called “Defining the AI Economy” that quantified the current economic state of AI in the U.S.
Her team found that 13.5 million U.S. jobs are supported by the AI economy, but also that over 75% of those jobs lie in the physical infrastructure and “enabling sectors” (like data centers) of the industry, not in the software side of things. That amounts to $746 billion in annual wages.
Of great interest to Pittsburgh: The steel it takes to build a data center.
Ms. Doven’s prior research found steel to be a massive component of AI infrastructure, given that data centers are essentially “steel boxes within steel boxes,” she said, likening them to a Russian nesting doll.
This time, it’s not just urban centers that should benefit. For former steel towns with existing infrastructure, it’s a matter of being “turned back on,” and reintroduced in the new AI economy, Ms. Doven said.
Trade unionists, including Kenneth Broadbent, the business manager of Steamfitters Local 449, are championing local AI development to keep jobs in state.
Virginia is home to 576 data centers out of a national total of 3,760, according to the Data Center Map database. In 2023, Virginia was the top importer of electricity of any state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has consistently ranked as the top exporter of electricity in the country.
“We’re sick of seeing projects in other states, whether it’s data centers or semiconductor facilities, when Pennsylvania has the best resources, whether it’s natural gas or workforce, talented building trades, construction workers,” Mr. Broadbent said. “Every month we wait to attract data centers, it costs us a year.”
Steamfitters work with heating, air conditioning, refrigeration — and process pipe, or “anything that runs fuel pipe in a process,” Mr. Broadbent said. To him, AI is the next big thing for Steamfitters, and Western Pennsylvania is poised to be “the Silicon Valley of artificial intelligence.”
“We’re on the grid system with plenty of acreage, and we’re sitting on the second largest deposit of natural gas on the planet,” he said. “We also got two of the best universities for artificial intelligence in the country. So nobody is poised better to create electricity, which you’re going to require for artificial intelligence to crunch data, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The “zone” Mr. Rothman proposed would blanket the entire Commonwealth, he said, not a single or particular region.
To boost economic growth in the 1980s, Pennsylvania and other states introduced an urban policy of “enterprise zones” in which businesses received tax exemptions and incentives. In 2017, federal “Opportunity Zones” were created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to invest in “distressed” or low-income areas of the country and provide tax benefits to investors.
But Mr. Rothman said he’s not out for tax benefits.
“We’re just asking for expedited approvals and a welcome mat saying the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wants AI business.”
Chloe Jad is a business reporter focusing on tech and artificial intelligence. She’s a 2025 graduate of Boston University’s College of Communication. Reach her at cjad@post-gazette.com.
First Published: June 4, 2025, 1:50 p.m.
