(WHTM) — It was quite a summit of who’s who in politics and business.

Carnegie Mellon University welcomed President Donald Trump and Senator Dave McCormick, who touted Pennsylvania’s energy future at its Energy and Innovation Summit. The brightest minds and biggest names in energy focused on AI. The intelligence might be artificial, but its power needs are very real.

“The new AI data centers are incredibly power hungry,” said White House AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks. “We need a lot of electricity, and that means making it easier to generate new power in the United States. I know that Pennsylvania is going to play a huge role in that.”

Money is needed. $90 billion of it pledged to Pennsylvania, including $25 billion by Blackstone.

“What’s going on is a rewiring of the economy of the world over the next 15 years,” said Blackstone President and CEO Jon Gray, “and that takes trillions and trillions and trillions and tens of trillions of dollars.”

However, investors and companies want more electricity and less regulation.

“If you make it harder, riskier, and more expensive to do stuff in America, guess what? You’ll get a little bit less of it,” said US Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

There’s a serious shortage of tradesmen and women to build the plants, and higher-tech students from schools like Carnegie Mellon.

“Today, China produces more scientists and engineers with a bachelor’s degree than the United States, Europe and Japan put together. That’s staggering data,” said Farnam Jahanian, the president of Carnegie Mellon.

China was mentioned numerous times during the summit.

“This is a global race for both energy dominance and air dominance,” said Governor Josh Shapiro. “We need homegrown Pennsylvanians to be doing this work. We do not want China to beat us in this AI race. This is one of the most important national security questions we have.”

“China is opening a new coal plant a week and trying to get us to close a coal plant a week,” said Howard Lutnik, the U.S. secretary of Commerce. “We are the fastest runners in the world, and our adversaries have convinced us to take our right hand and hold our right ankle, and let’s go run the race. We need to do clean, beautiful coal. We need to use natural gas. We need to embrace nuclear. We need to embrace it all because we have the power to do it, and if we don’t do it, we’re fools.”

McCormick is confident Pennsylvania can lead the fight, but he said we need to act quickly.

“We have a great set of cards, but the question is, are we going to be able to play those cards to maximize the moment?” said McCormick. “This isn’t a ‘The next decade’ kind of thing. This is 6, 12, 24, 36 months.”