Pennsylvania is America's swing state.
Trump beat Harris here by 1.7% – the second-closest margin of any state.
Last year’s U.S. Senate race unseated a three-term Democratic incumbent by 16,000 votes.
The Legislature is one of only a few with divided party control: Republicans run the Senate, Democrats the House.
Yet Pennsylvania is winning the AI infrastructure competition at historic scale – in large part by forging a depth of collaboration rarely seen in modern American politics.
The proof:
June: Amazon’s $20 billion data center commitment – the largest private investment in Commonwealth history
July: Sen. McCormick’s Energy Innovation Summit delivered $92 billion of AI investment in a single day
Fall: Moody’s reported that Pennsylvania is the only Northeastern state with an expanding economy – one of just sixteen nationally
Everywhere I travel, I get the same question: How is Pennsylvania doing this?
The momentum is rattling long-standing state rivals.
“I can be cutting a ribbon on a plant in Pennsylvania before I can even get through the permitting process in New Jersey,” New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill told a manufacturing forum while campaigning in October.
Her opponent Jack Ciatarelli was blunter: "Pennsylvania is kicking our ass on data centers.”
This week’s Standard & Works newsletter breaks down Pennsylvania’s playbook, drawing on more than thirty interviews – from the Governor to CEOs to laborers to key economic development stakeholders – completed across Zooms, and end-to-end trips on the Turnpike.
But first, as Standard & Works marks 90 days, a brief note of gratitude:
We launched in Pittsburgh. Our name traces its roots there. We witnessed the Energy Innovation Summit and AI Horizons firsthand. Pennsylvania has been a through line in our reporting since Day 1. It is exhilarating to cover this critically important state at this moment of transformation.
Thank you to everyone who has been with us and joined along the way.
Now, let’s break it down.
Zach Silber
Editor-in-Chief, Standard & Works
1. 🤝 Tri-Partisan Execution
July's Energy Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh was historic.
The President. Five Cabinet members. More than sixty CEOs and investors.
Local leaders whose work long predated the Summit are still in awe of seeing the state operate on such a global economic stage.
I was there too. One of the most powerful moments of the day was a panel featuring Senator Dave McCormick, Governor Josh Shapiro, and AWS CEO Matt Garman pulling back the curtain on how the $20 billion Amazon deal actually landed.
The panel itself embodied what made the deal possible – collaboration between two leaders of opposing parties and one of the world's largest CapEx investors.
AWS’ Garman gave it a name:
"It's tri-partisan. That partnership with the commercial sector is critical. We jointly win together."
Of course, Shapiro and McCormick don’t agree on everything. They disagreed on the One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the week before the Summit.
But on economic development, they built something unique: a two-person SWAT team with complementary tools, networks, and authorities. One controls state permitting. One works federal relationships and brings private sector clout. Both signal relentlessly that Pennsylvania is open, aggressive, and ready to move.
Shapiro framed it as a strategic division of labor.
"The Senator knows I bring certain tools to the conversation that he doesn't bring. And I know he brings certain tools to the conversation that I don't bring. If we actually work together, one plus one starts to equal three."
He views bipartisan collaboration as a requirement of governing the nation’s “swingiest state.”
"I'm one of the only governors in the country with a divided legislature. For any bill to get to my desk, for any law I sign, it requires votes from Republicans and Democrats. That's not only how I'm wired, to create partnerships, it's a necessity."
McCormick underscored why alignment matters to investors:
“If you’re a CEO and you want to invest a bunch of money and you meet the Governor and he’s talking bad about me – and vice versa – it makes you not want to invest. We need to be aligned at all levels.”
He’s fulfilled his duty. As the Commonwealth’s point person in Washington, McCormick has described himself as “the SVP of business development for Pennsylvania,” and his Senate office hired a full-time staffer dedicated to commercial opportunities.
The result: Tri-partisan execution at a level few states can match.
2. ⚡ Energy Abundance
Dan Adamski, executive managing director at JLL in Pittsburgh, works with companies deciding where to locate projects across the country.
In an interview with Standard & Works at the AI Horizons Summit in September, he rattled-off the “top three” criteria in AI site selection:
“Power, power and power.”
Enter Pennsylvania, one of the few states that produces more energy than it consumes – second only to Texas in energy exports.
Pennsylvania’s energy advantage:
Marcellus Shale natural gas – the world’s second largest reserve
Three Mile Island nuclear plant coming back online for a Microsoft data center
Butler County's Westinghouse owns the technology behind most of the nation's nuclear fleet and is planning 10 new large reactors by 2030
The legislature is considering a bill to prepare warehouses to host rooftop solar – an unintrusive, highly-scalable energy source
Former steel mills and coal plants with existing grid connections ready to repurpose
The Governor has made clear he's an all-of-the-above energy leader who won't let the state’s energy advantage falter.
In Washington this week, Shapiro took aim at grid operator PJM which manages what power connects to the transmission system across 13 states – including Pennsylvania.
“PJM is broken. They’re too damn slow,” he said.
Which is why he’s convened a bipartisan coalition of governors to push for changes.
“If they do not accept those reforms, Pennsylvania's going to figure out how to go our own way.”
The bottom line: Pennsylvania has energy now.
3. 🏗️ Workforce Ready
Rich Fitzgerald signs the Standard & Works hardhat at AI Horizons
Before this moment of Amazon-scale investment, one of the Commonwealth’s most recent mega-projects was the Shell Cracker Plant, a $10 billion petrochemical project near State College that required 8,000 building trades workers.
Pennsylvania delivered the muscle without importing significant out-of-state labor, according to Rich Fitzgerald, a former three-term Allegheny County Executive who now leads the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission:
“That was not anything that was outside of the capability of the workers here. We have a specialized trained workforce that knows how to produce big industrial projects because we've been doing it for years."
Now multiple AI infrastructure projects are scaling simultaneously.
Homer City – a massive 4GW data center campus on the site of the Commonwealth’s formerly largest coal-fired power plant – needs 10,000 workers.
Another project in Shippingport will require comparable numbers, Fitzgerald said.
To ensure the workforce is ready, the record-sized Amazon deal included a partnership with the Commonwealth to establish talent pipelines at community colleges and high schools nearby the first two sites.
"If you're a 10th grader interested in welding, you're gonna get a job on one of these sites,” the Governor told the Energy Innovation Summit.
4. 🚀 Speed as Strategy
Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) discuss permitting reform at a SEMAFOR event in Washington D.C.
Pennsylvania’s reputation for speed is new.
As the Governor tells it, "We went from bottom five in the country on our permitting timelines to being top five." That meant eliminating 90% of the state’s permitting backlog.
The transformation was significant enough that Shapiro was asked to co-chair a National Governors Association working group on permitting reform with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.
I flew to Washington last week to watch the duo discuss this work with SEMAFOR Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith. They agreed on almost everything, but especially on three points:
First, speed is essential to winning the AI race against China.
"Our lunch is being eaten by other countries, particularly China, when it comes to speed," Shapiro said. "We are our own worst enemies."
Stitt shared a stat from a pipeline CEO: permitting now costs twice as much as actually building the project.
Second, the weaponization of permitting must be stopped.
Stitt pointed to Keystone: killed by Obama, revived by Trump, killed by Biden. "Investors are just going, 'enough's enough.'"
Both governors – a Republican championing wind, a Democrat championing natural gas – agreed: businesses can't plan when the rules change every four years.
Third, speed and certainty is a decisive factor in winning deals.
“ Businesses need certainty and they need speed. We need to put a shot clock on the permitting process,” Stitt said.
"Nine times out of ten, CEOs aren't looking for a handout," Shapiro added. "They want speed and certainty."
McCormick had a similar take at July’s Summit, where talk of tax breaks and subsidies – traditional business attraction tools – was non-existent:
"It's much more about speed and talent than subsidies. Ease of use to invest, ease of use with talent, ease of use with regulations."
The formula: Speed beats subsidies.
5. 🦅 An Offense Calibrated to Win
Pennsylvania is building the institutional machinery to win deals consistently.
The internal transformation started with the Shapiro Administration’s 10-year economic development strategy – the Commonwealth’s first in decades. That included overhauling its business attraction operation, integrating previously fragmented functions into a single organization, BusinessPA.
The restructure created a unified front from first contact to ribbon cutting. One CRM system. One leadership structure. One coordinated approach for companies evaluating Pennsylvania.
The external infrastructure features two newly-aligned forces.
This week the AI Strike Team went statewide. What started as a Pittsburgh initiative became Strike Team 2.0 – a supercharged platform for positioning Pennsylvania as the center of the AI economy.
It's now led by a board of industry heavyweights and has a new organizational home at Team Pennsylvania, a public-private partnership with statewide reach and policy depth.
Team Pennsylvania recently released a 10-year Energy, Data Center, and AI Roadmap, which sets a coordinated decade-long path for how Pennsylvania can compete, including:
Scaling AI across the state’s manufacturing sector, particularly among small and midsized companies
Channeling efforts on deploying nuclear energy
Systematically building a comprehensive AI/Robotics value chain
The Roadmap aligns with the Commonwealth’s own strategy and builds on discussions held at the Energy Innovation Summit and AI Horizons Summit.
The output: an offense calibrated to win.
6. ⏰ Racing Against the Clock
All of this activity is happening at a breakneck pace by design. The clock is ticking – not only for America to lead on AI globally, but for states to win investment as billions in AI CapEx redraws the nation’s economic map.
“This isn't a next decade kind of thing. This is 6, 12, 24, 36 months,” McCormick said at July’s summit.
He added: "We are closer to the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end. If we seize this moment together, we're gonna look back and say, that's where we turned the corner."
A core theme driving the urgency: the imperative to beat China in the race for AI dominance.
“There may not be a bigger national security imperative than winning this technology race,” AWS’ Garman implored during the July panel.
Five months later, Shapiro is still carrying that message, including to Washington this week:
“AI is being developed. The real question is, is it gonna be developed here in the United States or in communist China? My view is that all of us should want to develop in the United States. The United States should lead on this.”
Why All This Matters
Pennsylvania has been a through line of Standard & Works reporting since we launched 90 days ago
The economy is undergoing massive transformation from AI. On the sidelines: states that are too skittish or slow to compete.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is not only embracing, but forging this new chapter. It’s doing so in Harrisburg, in Pittsburgh, in Washington, and in the communities across the Commonwealth where digital infrastructure is rising.
The implications of this mad dash to capture investment and build fast are global in scale. That’s because America’s place in the AI race increasingly hinges on the Keystone State.
But inside the Commonwealth’s borders, the most important output of this economic juggernaut ultimately will be the fortunes of state residents.
These are the voters who command the most decisive say in national elections and have shown that the economy is their measure for determining how they cast their all-powerful ballots.
As we enter 2026, Standard & Works will remain fixated on how this story continues to unfold.
Thank you for being with us on this journey.
