During World War II, Pittsburgh produced 95 million tons of steel – more than the total steel production of all the Axis powers combined. Newport News Shipbuilding in Hampton Roads produced 50% of the United States aircraft carrier fleet that saw active combat.
The two regions helped win the war. Now both are positioning to lead the next industrial era – one in which over $1 trillion is expected to be invested every year on defense, AI, and related infrastructure for at least a decade.
That was the framing Joanna Doven, CEO of Pennsylvania's AI Strike Team, brought to a crowd of over 100 stakeholders as the keynote speaker of the Hampton Roads Alliance's Annual Meeting last week.
Doven flew south to make the argument that regions with those industrial bones are best positioned to capture the capital – if they move.
"If you're an existing locality that has a right to win – like Pittsburgh, like Hampton Roads – understand that it's not necessarily the case that you're going to win," Doven told the room. "Because others want to play."
She came to share the playbook that has given rise to Pittsburgh's 21st century moment as the center of the nation's AI revolution.
Earning the Right to Win
Pittsburgh's AI Strike Team didn't come out of a government office or a university lab.
It came from Doven – granddaughter of a steelworker and a Cuban immigrant who became the youngest big-city press secretary in the country at 21 and led comms for the G20 Economic Summit in 2009 when world leaders descended on Pittsburgh.
She saw the city's AI moment before almost anyone else did.
In 2022, AI companies were quietly leasing space in a vacant building near Carnegie Mellon, but the mayor was disengaged from economic development and traditional stakeholders wouldn't say the letters "AI" out loud.
Doven saw a power vacuum – and an opportunity.
She convened a cross-sector working group to position Pittsburgh as an AI hub before the market moved without them.
This was 2022. Four meetings in, ChatGPT launched and the world caught up.
The working group became the AI Strike Team and Doven launched the AI Horizons Summit to plant Pittsburgh's flag.
Now entering its third year, the Summit has brought leaders from Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator Dave McCormick to the CEOs of BNY and Westinghouse to its stage.
It's where Nvidia came to name Pittsburgh its first AI Tech Community in the world.
She has refused to stand still.
She saw bringing Waymo back to Pittsburgh – the city where its foundational technology was hatched at Carnegie Mellon – as a critical signal of being “a city of the future.” But Pittsburgh's bridges, hills, and snow were viewed as obstacles.
So Doven flew to California and leveraged relationships to convince Waymo to accelerate its Pittsburgh deployment by three years. Now Waymo is preparing to test its fleet.
Doven's playbook has helped land over 20 AI companies in a single corridor in Pittsburgh she helped dub AI Avenue. The AI Strike Team has now gone statewide and is raising a billion-dollar Pennsylvania AI venture fund.
The message: tell your story before anyone else does, move faster than consensus, and keep thinking bigger.
Just this week, the AI Strike Team announced Mark Cuban is returning to Pittsburgh on the eve of the NFL Draft next month to judge a $1 million AI pitch competition.
Why Hampton Roads
Doug Smith, president of the Hampton Roads Alliance – the economic development force backed by the cities, businesses, and institutions that make up the region known as America's Military Metro – invited Doven to be the group’s keynote speaker for a reason.
"How do we think even bigger?" Smith posed to the audience.
The alignment is already there – and the numbers prove it.
The thesis is focused. The Hampton Roads DEAL playbook – defense, energy, aerospace, logistics – is the region’s strategy to engage companies at a moment when investment in these sectors is surging.
The playbook is working. The day before the Alliance’s meeting, Governor Abigail Spanberger and Radian Forge, an additive manufacturing startup, announced a $10.5 million investment at the Fairlead shipyard in Portsmouth to produce parts for the Navy – exactly the kind of company the playbook is designed to attract.
The results are compounding. 2025 was the third consecutive year for record capital investment in Hampton Roads: 22 announcements, over $1 billion, 2,400 jobs – headlined by LS Cable & System's $689 million commitment in Chesapeake, the region’s largest ever.
The ambition is scaling. This month, a 40-person delegation of Hampton Roads leaders heads to London on a defense industry economic mission.
The trip builds on the region’s international ties – Hampton Roads hosts NATO’s North America headquarters and plays a critical role in AUKUS, the trilateral partnership accelerating nuclear-powered submarines and advanced capabilities across AI, quantum, cyber, and hypersonics in the Indo-Pacific.
The Opportunity
Doven's message: The opportunity right now is larger than anyone might realize.
"When you look at your economy, it's not just that you're a defense base and a shipbuilding hub," Doven told the room. "If you look at the entire supply chain of the AI economy, you all have a place to play."
The AI economy needs transformers, subsea cable infrastructure, and small modular reactors – heavy, complex systems that move through deep-water channels.
Hampton Roads has the port, the workforce, and the supply chain.
Seeing that – and acting on it – requires a different kind of mentality.
"Think about your DNA right now – your natural proclivities, the organizations with which you interact – and recognize that it is a very uncomfortable time," Doven said. "This is a time to lean into that, because we have to move in order to win.”
Her charge to the room was to match that urgency with scale.
"If we think instead of doing 10 small plays – if we do three really big plays that are not incremental – we'll look back at this moment and say we didn't lose it."
