As part of Amazon’s forthcoming investment of $20 billion in Pennsylvania, AWS’s plans for several new AI data centers across the state includes one in the Anthracite Coal Region, which 200 years ago established itself as one of the country’s richest sources of energy for the Industrial Revolution.
About 1,600 miles southwest of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region in Abilene, Texas —population 125,000 — Oracle and OpenAI are building what could turn out to be the world’s largest AI data center in a town long known for manufacturing, oil and gas production, and ranching. (For more on that, please see “Oracle and OpenAI Are Rocking AI World with $500-Billion Stargate Startup.”)
While these and many other regions across the country have been striving to transcend their historic pasts by diversifying into new industries, the AI Revolution is turbocharging that evolution in ways that few people could have expected just a few years ago.
It’s all part of an extraordinary evolution that I’m choosing to call not just “the re-industrialization” but rather “the AI-industrialization” of America. And from my June 12 Cloud Wars Newsletter, here’s an excerpt that frames the size and scope of these two examples of a much-larger trend:
I’m getting more and more on-board with Jensen Huang’s “AI factories” term to describe the tech industry’s extraordinary expansion beyond digital bits to spectacularly big and complex 21st-century industrial plants that pump out not steel and cars and pipe but rather AI training, cloud services, and data analytics.
So as someone born and raised in a Pennsylvania steel town not far from once-prosperous coal mines, I was intrigued to see that Amazon is building two AI data centers in the Keystone State as part of a broad-based $20-billion investment in the commonwealth to “expand cloud-computing infrastructure and advance AI innovation.”
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One of those two planned data centers — and with a commitment of $20 billion, I think we can expect that number to grow well beyond those first two — is in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, part of the 6-county Anthracite Coal Region that played such an indispensable role in fueling the heavy-industry boom in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. As noted in a Penn State University Libraries article about that area, “The industrial, institutional, and practical modernization of the United States was contingent on the labor and the lives both lived and lost in the Anthracite Coal Region.”
But soon, AWS will help Luzerne County contribute once again to the dynamic modernization of the United States via the proposed new data center, with the second one slated for Bucks County in the southeast part of the state.
In a press release, Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky said the company’s $20-billion investment in the state “reinforces our dedication to advancing AI innovation” and “cloud computing infrastructure.” He also noted the Amazon’s desire to help create “lasting economic opportunities” through “new jobs, workforce-development programs, and community initiatives.”
Calling Amazon’s commitment “the largest private-sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania,” Governor Josh Shapiro said Amazon plans to build “new state-of-the-art data center campuses across our Commonwealth.” While Shapiro did not disclose any details as to how many such data-center campuses are planned or where they’ll be located beyond the ones in Luzerne and Bucks counties, he did stretch the truth at least a little bit by proclaiming that the Amazon investment ensures that “the future of AI runs right through Pennsylvania.”
But let’s agree to chalk up that fairly wild exaggeration to the Gov’s understandable exuberance in having just landed a huge investment for his state for an industry that is every bit as vital to the future of Pennsylvania and the entire United States as coal and steel were to their pasts….
It’s ironic — and wonderful — to see that as the emergence of the newest “heavy industry” in the United States turns out to be AI factories (thank you, Jensen Huang!), we are also seeing a massive revitalization of the original heavy industries in this country as well: steel, coal, automobiles, ships, and more.
And I say it’s wonderful because for a long time, we were conditioned to believe that those old businesses and those old ways of life were gone, finished, never to be seen again.
But that was just a failure of imagination, and of will, and of the human spirit. In the same way, most of us would probably never have imagined that the heart of the Anthracite Coal Region would one day become home to an incredibly advanced AWS data center — but soon, that vision will come true.
Final Thought
While the AI data centers moving into Pennsylvania’s coal country and Texas’s Permian Basin won’t themselves be big employers — the hyperscale world demands massive levels of automation — they will very likely become sources of inspiration and innovation for other businesses in those areas and across the country. Across the world, in fact.
And they provide a big reminder to all business executives that the norms of the past — however effective they were and/or have been — will simply not be sufficient for a very different future in a world where AI is indeed changing everything. We all have a choice to make: remain stuck in the mindset and business models of the past, or jump on this opportunity to help create the innovative and AI-powered models of the future.
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