Earlier this year, Gov. Shapiro announced a deal with Amazon to invest $20 billion in PA for AI infrastructure — including $10 million in workforce training to prepare workers for careers in data center construction and operations — as part of a plan to make Pennsylvania a “leader in artificial intelligence and next-generation computing.”

According to the governor’s office, the project will create at least 1,250 high-paying skilled jobs for data center engineers and network specialists, in addition to thousands of local construction and supplier jobs.

The governor’s enthusiastic support for a massive build out of AI infrastructure — mostly in Northeast PA — is naive and premature.

Those of us who have been around a while may find these hyperbolic job projections — whether intentional or otherwise — reminiscent of the inflated statistics presented to a gullible public during Pennsylvania’s fracking boom of the 2010s, when headlines like the following flooded the newspapers daily:

“Energy Sector Hiring Frenzy: New jobs Bring High Wages to Rural Pennsylvania!”

“Boomtowns Emerge in PA as Fracking Jobs Flood the Market!”

“Marcellus Shale development creates thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania, boosts state economy!” Etc. Etc.

We now know those statistics were wildly inflated and that the true number of jobs created by fracking was a mere fraction of what was projected. Research shows the heavily fracked counties at the center of the shale gas boom, despite producing large amounts of gas, continued to see population declines and were no better off economically than they were before fracking came to town.

Given the similarities, the data center frenzy in northeast PA should be approached with caution, lest we lose thousands of acres of ecologically valuable land, rare species habitat, and productive farmland, for a project designed to accelerate the robotization of the workforce and the emergence of a growing technocracy.

Juliet Perrin

Albrightsville