Data centers are an economic engine creating a blue collar boom in Pennsylvania — with secure welders and electricians making over $100K — and the opposition is driven by misinformation from China and outside forces, similar to what happened with fracking.

So just in the last 15, 16 months, and these are related, by the way. It's not just energy projects and data centers. It's US Steel and a next generation mill. It's Eli Lilly building a new plant. It's Hanwha and the Philadelphia shipyard. But they're coming in part because of the data centers and the energy projects. And so I've spent a lot of time with the trades lately. The most secure job in Pennsylvania right now is a secure welder. I mean, is a seasoned welder. An electrician. These, honestly, these folks are coming out, they're getting the training, they're in their late teens, early 20s. They're making more than 100 grand a year in these sites, and they can't build, they can't hire quick enough. They can't find enough people to meet the demand. And, you know, the data centers, I mean, I've looked closely at that. There's one, you know, coming in Berwick, Pennsylvania, right next to where I went to high school. The way to think about it is there's sort of four buckets of economic activity that comes, jobs that come. There's, of course, the deals that come with them, but there's the thousands of jobs to build the data centers and the energy that goes side by side. So these are five, 10,000 folks on the site. Then there's the hundreds of people to run the data centers. Then, of course, every three to four years, the hardware and everything in the data centers gets upgraded, which brings in hundreds, sometimes thousands of jobs. There's the energy that's going side by side. Then there's the restaurants, the hotels. I met with the trucking association the other day. They guess that it's about two logistics jobs for every one job in a data center. These things are economic engines. So once you get that covenant straight, people are willing to make the decision. And if a township supervisor or a county commissioner, no senator is going to tell them to do this. Has to come from the ground up in terms of making the decision. But once they decide to do that, it's a huge engine for their communities. If they decide not to do it, my point is, okay, where's your plan? What is the plan? In Pennsylvania, we've been losing people for 20 years. We can't get our kids to stay. This is like a rebirth. It's amazing what's happening, but we got to break through the misinformation.

verbatim transcript · starts at 30:22