AI is “not my thing,” President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisors had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI.
“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”
At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where panelists and attendees included, in addition to Sacks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio, and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.
For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.
All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.
Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.