The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit will be held at Carnegie Mellon University, and it comes as the state's political and business leaders are working to forge the city into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and energy.
Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania — a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 — is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal industry that the Republican administration has taken several steps to bolster.
Neither the White House nor McCormick's office gave breakdowns of the $70 billion or what the investments entail.
McCormick, a Republican first-term senator who is organizing the inaugural event, says the summit is meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump's energy policies and priorities. He says the investments will spur tens of thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania.
“Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned because of abundant energy, of incredible skilled workers, technology,” McCormick said in a Fox News interview Monday promoting the summit. “We need to win the battle for AI innovation in America, and Pennsylvania is at the center of it.”
The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, will also attend.
Administration officials speaking at the summit include White House crypto czar David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
In the Fox News interview, McCormick credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.
Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called " AI Avenue" that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.
