Roadmap Drivers
Team Pennsylvania approaches the convergence of energy transformation, data center expansion, and artificial intelligence, embracing the organizational goals that drive all of our work: collaboration, leadership, impact, and empowerment. This roadmap is not a prescriptive regulation, a technology catalog, nor a siting guide. It is a forward-looking, action-oriented, and inclusive framework intended to organize stakeholders around shared priorities while recognizing that the complexity of the moment requires agility, engagement, and an openness to debate.
Through this roadmap, Team Pennsylvania lifts up its role as a trusted convener and catalyst focused at a state level. We invite leaders from business, labor, academia, government, and nonprofit organizations to engage with the framework, challenge assumptions, and identify the next steps we can take together. By doing so, we position the commonwealth not just to adapt to the AI era, but to help define it, ensuring that innovation, energy leadership, and broad-based prosperity move forward in concert.
The pace of change demands that we act now or risk having Pennsylvania left behind, as none of this work is easy and will take time. This is what we know: AI adoption is accelerating. Energy demand is climbing within the state and more broadly in our region. Infrastructure pressures are converging. There should be no debate that this lay of the land is a fair assessment.
Aspects of this roadmap are bold and may feel provocative. We aim to shift what feels like a chorus of disconnected discussions covering large and complex topics to key actions, accelerating progress where Pennsylvania has the capacity to make a difference. We acknowledge there are sizable boundary lines between what is within, and not within, anyone’s control. For example, Pennsylvania can act decisively in areas such as permitting, cross-sector coordination, and talent preparation, while recognizing policies, markets, and infrastructure systems are at a national or global level–changing even as this document is being drafted.
This roadmap embraces a bias toward economic betterment, explicitly with a vision to create durable value for Pennsylvania’s communities, workers, and institutions. That means both looking at long-term strategies and near-term actions that strengthen the state and local economies and affirm our position as a leader in both innovation and energy reliability. We see, as an example, particular promise in leveraging Pennsylvania’s energy strengths and technological leadership to meet today’s and the future’s evolving compute power needs.
We are clear-eyed about guardrails and realism. The development of AI and the infrastructure that powers it is shaped by a web of global supply chains and shifting geopolitical currents that no single state can influence. This roadmap offers an informed structure to guide decision-making in Pennsylvania without pretending to have every answer. It must evolve with technology, markets, and stakeholder expertise and input. It is not perfect because no crystal ball exists. Our goal is to provide a shared foundation to organize around and refine together over time.