Pittsburgh's Real Renaissance Has Never Been Tried — Until Now

I’ve followed enough Pittsburgh renaissances to know they usually amount to a hill of beans. The eds-and-meds miracle that was supposed to save us? Ask the University of Pittsburgh secretaries making $38,000 a year how that worked out while they watch Polish Hill homes list for $700,000. The robotics revolution? Sure, if you count Chinese-born CMU PhDs heading straight to Silicon Valley after graduation. But Tuesday’s AI-energy summit at Carnegie Mellon felt different, and not just because I watched Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick share a stage without throwing haymakers.

But beneath the political kabuki lies a genuine value proposition that's been staring us in the face since the Marcellus Shale boom started: Pennsylvania sits on the second-largest natural gas reserves in the nation, and we have the skilled tradespeople who cut their teeth extracting it. While everyone waits for the nuclear renaissance that local engineering conglomerate Westinghouse will spend the better part of the next decade delivering, data centers need power now. Natural gas is the bridge fuel, and that bridge spans Western Pennsylvania’s rocky terrain.

The numbers tell the story. Blackstone pledged $25 billion for data centers and gas-fired power in Pennsylvania. CoreWeave committed $6 billion for facilities in Lancaster. EQT Corp signed gas contracts that McCormick’s office valued at $15 billion for the Homer City redevelopment in Indiana County. These aren't speculative ventures hoping to strike oil. The gas is already there, the pipelines exist, and those 7,000+ operating engineers in IUOE Local 66 – trained on two decades of Marcellus Shale projects – know exactly how to build the infrastructure these companies need.

This puts to bed the tedious fracking debate that’s paralyzed Pennsylvania politics for a decade. McCormick and Shapiro, whatever their other differences, seem united on this: we’re in urgent times for energy. It’s all of the above – gas now, nuclear later, and let the perfect be the enemy of the good at your own economic peril.

Rich Fitzgerald, the former county executive who now oversees the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, has pointed out that the region has everything data centers need: abundant water for cooling, skilled workers to build facilities, and access to one of the largest gas fields in the nation. Of course, he’s not saying anything we haven't known for years. The difference now is that AI’s insatiable appetite for power has finally created demand that matches our supply.

The historical parallel is almost too perfect. In the 1880s, Henry Clay Frick’s control of regional coke –  the fuel that powered steel furnaces – made Andrew Carnegie's Pittsburgh empire possible. The coke was right there in the Connellsville seam that ran through my father’s hometown, and Frick knew how to get it out and get it to market. Now it’s natural gas that will fuel the server farms powering the next technological revolution. 

The summit’s attendees understood this. Brendan Bechtel, whose company built the Shell cracker plant in Potter, noted that we can build big stuff – the challenge isn’t technical capacity but permitting and regulatory certainty. That’s why the bipartisan showing on Shapiro’s part genuinely mattered. CEOs need to know that when the administration changes, their projects won’t get torpedoed by political vendettas.

Of course, environmental groups are apoplectic. Their concerns about air quality and the like aren’t entirely misplaced – burning gas for data centers does lock in decades of carbon emissions. But the alternative isn’t solar panels and wind farms powering Google’s servers. The alternative is those data centers getting built in Texas or overseas, where environmental standards are lower and the economic benefits flow elsewhere. Ask the people of Shenzhen if they’d prefer pristine air or decent-paying jobs on China’s 996 grueling work schedule.

The 10-to-20-year window is key. That’s roughly how long it’ll take for next-generation nuclear to scale up, assuming Westinghouse's plans to build 10 new facilities by 2030 aren’t complete fantasy. During that gap, natural gas is the only truly feasible baseload power source for facilities that can’t tolerate a cloudy day shutting down their servers.

Pennsylvania's advantage won’t be permanent – we were already losing our steel dominance to Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo by the 1920s – but it’s real and it’s immediate. And in the long run, we’re all dead anyway.

What makes me guardedly optimistic (and I’m not one for optimism about Pittsburgh's economic prospects) is that this isn’t another attempt to remake the city into something it’s not. We’re not trying to become the next Austin or convince ourselves that robot butlers and self-driving cars will save some yuppie carpetbagger’s neighborhood-busting bistro in Homewood. This is about doing what Western Pennsylvania has done best: pulling valuable stuff out of the ground and turning it into money.

I’ll be the first to point out Pittsburgh’s failures – the brain drain, the displacement, the false promises about industrial redevelopment and affordable housing dating back to the 1950s. But this time feels different. Not because I’ve suddenly become a booster, but because the math actually works. We have the gas. We have the workers. For the first time in my life covering this city’s endless reinvention schemes, I got to stand shoulder to shoulder with rich people who actually need us.

Maybe this time, the renaissance will actually happen. Not because we transformed ourselves into something we're not, but because the world’s power players again want what we've always had. That's a bet I'm willing to make, even if it means agreeing with both Shapiro and McCormick. Especially if it does. Strange times indeed.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.