The Next Industrial Revolution? Not so fast …

There are certain words Western Pennsylvanians have learned to approach with the same caution they reserve for an unfamiliar dog and a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. “Redevelopment” is one. “Transformational” is another. “Economic renaissance” should probably require a permit.

Now comes artificial intelligence, accompanied by an industrial building boom so enormous that otherwise sober people have begun speaking of the next Industrial Revolution.

Perhaps.

But those of us who have already experienced one Industrial Revolution—and spent half a century cleaning up after it—might be forgiven for asking a few questions before ordering the commemorative plates.

The latest promised salvation comes in the form of data centers: immense, windowless buildings filled not with steelworkers and assembly lines, but servers. They are spreading across Ohio and increasingly Western Pennsylvania, where developers have rediscovered something our grandparents knew: We have land, water, energy, and people accustomed to having large industrial objects in the neighborhood.

Ohio got there first.

It sits on the enormous PJM electrical grid. Columbus is within a day’s drive of nearly half the American population and close to major fiber routes. Deindustrialization left plenty of flat land.

And then there are the tax incentives.

Nothing makes a technology company appreciate the natural beauty of the Midwest quite like a 100-percent property-tax abatement.

Ohio has reportedly granted about $2.3 billion in data-center tax exemptions, on the theory that attracting investment is more important than taxing it.

That made considerable sense when the prize was a factory employing 3,000 people.

The trouble is that a data center isn’t a factory.

A factory employed thousands of people who bought houses, raised families, joined churches, bought Chevrolets, and complained about their supervisors over beer. Their wages circulated through town.

A data center employs computers.

One frequently cited $136 million data-center project created roughly 10 permanent jobs. Ohio’s 217 data centers collectively employ about 11,800 people. Ohio manufacturing employs roughly 687,000.

This doesn’t make data centers bad. It simply makes them something other than what politicians sometimes pretend they are.

A billion dollars of investment sounds like a billion dollars of prosperity. They aren’t necessarily the same thing.

That distinction matters because Beaver County is about to become part of the experiment.

We already have Big Digital Energy’s operation in Midland. At Shippingport, Aligned Data Centers’ proposed “Project Phoenix” could eventually include three enormous buildings totaling around two million square feet, with its own natural-gas generation. In Big Beaver, Switch has proposed a multi-building campus at the former Pittsburgh International Race Complex.

Travel east, and the scale becomes almost difficult to comprehend. Homer City, the former coal-fired power station, is being transformed into an energy and data-center campus that could eventually require several gigawatts of power.

A gigawatt used to be something Doc Brown needed to get the DeLorean back to 1985.

Now apparently it is a zoning matter.

There is much to like about this development. Reusing abandoned coal plants and industrial properties beats leaving them as monuments to things we no longer make. Construction means real jobs for electricians, operating engineers, pipefitters, and truck drivers.

Western Pennsylvania also has genuine advantages: abundant natural gas, major transmission infrastructure, brownfields, water, and a climate friendlier to cooling computers than Phoenix.

If AI really is as important as its evangelists believe, there is no reason Western Pennsylvania should watch it happen from the sidelines.

But Ohio provides a warning label.

Residential electricity bills there have risen sharply since 2021. Data centers aren’t solely responsible, but enormous new concentrations of electrical demand raise an obvious question: Who pays for all this?

Interestingly, the Trump administration has asked essentially the same thing.

In March, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed the administration’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Its central principle is refreshingly simple: If you need enough electricity to run a small city, don’t send the bill to the people already living there.

The companies pledged to build, bring, or purchase new generation, pay the costs of necessary power-delivery upgrades, and accept separate rate structures rather than spreading those expenses among ordinary customers. They also agreed to make backup generation available during emergencies, and hire and train workers locally.

President Trump puts the proposition more colorfully: Build your own power plant.

There is something almost quaint about this idea. A company requires something; the company pays for it.

Several Western Pennsylvania projects already contemplate “behind-the-meter” natural-gas generation. Instead of plugging an enormous data center into the existing system and hoping somebody finds another gigawatt behind the sofa cushions, developers build much of the power supply themselves.

That is a promising model.

But a pledge isn’t a law. It is voluntary. And generation is only part of an electric bill. Transmission, fuel prices, and capacity markets can still find their way onto household bills through routes sufficiently complicated to require an electrical engineer, an economist, and possibly a priest to explain them.

So Beaver County’s job isn’t simply to applaud the pledge. It is to apply its principle locally.

Before approving enormous data centers or granting tax concessions, officials should ask some old-fashioned questions. How many permanent jobs? What will they pay? Who pays for roads, fire protection, substations, and emergency services? How much water will be consumed? How much noise will neighbors hear at two in the morning?

And above all: Who pays for the electricity?

If the answer is the developer, excellent. Put it in writing.

If the answer eventually becomes the homeowner in Beaver, Brighton Township, or Big Beaver through higher electric rates, the economic-development arithmetic looks considerably less impressive.

None of this is an argument against artificial intelligence. Western Pennsylvania ought to compete aggressively for industries that will shape the next half-century.

But we have been through this before. For generations, we supplied America with coal, steel, glass, and electricity. We provided the land, resources, and labor. Enormous fortunes were made.

Then the furnaces went cold, the headquarters moved elsewhere, and we discovered that industrial revolutions have a distressing habit of leaving their forwarding address blank.

So bring us the servers, fiber, construction cranes, and billions of dollars. Build the power plants. Rebuild the brownfields. Hire our electricians and pipefitters.

And if the world’s richest technology companies require enough electricity to illuminate half of Pennsylvania, by all means sell it to them.

Just don’t put it on Grandma’s electric bill.

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge has the right principle: pay your own way.

Beaver County should insist on precisely the same one.

And before we cut the ribbon on the Next Industrial Revolution, let’s make certain this one remembers to bring something the last one had in abundance.

Jobs.