PITTSBURGH – The building at the corner of Penn Avenue and East Liberty Boulevard in many ways serves as a metaphor for the city of Pittsburgh.
Constructed in 1918 as a then-modern factory for the National Biscuit Co., or Nabisco, the plant was expanded during the 1940s, creating 1,000 jobs. But by the 1980s, it was fighting for its survival. Nabisco closed the site for good in 1998 and the city in 2006 declared it a blighted property.
But like Pittsburgh’s rebound from the collapse of the steel industry, this building and its six-acre site has also reinvented itself. It’s now a dynamic center that embraces the research, development and commercialization of artificial intelligence technology.
Now known as Bakery Square, the development spearheaded by Pittsburgh-based Walnut Capital Management is part of AI Avenue, a one-mile corridor extending from the intersection of Penn and Fifth avenues that is home to more than 20 young AI companies, says Joanna Doven, founder of AI Horizons, a not for profit that helps coordinate AI-focused economic development strategies across the region. These firms join an already vibrant tech community there, anchored by Google, Duolingo, Carnegie Mellon University’s Cloud Lab, and UPMC Enterprises.
Yet Bakery Square, Doven says, is just one example of how the city, it’s academic and research institutions, and public sector have worked together to place Pittsburgh at the forefront of the AI revolution.
PITTSBURGH’S CHALLENGE
Says Devon, “Pittsburgh is a tale of two cities.” On one hand, the city is home to the No. 1 research and education institution in the world for AI: Carnegie Mellon University. For decades, the university has led the charge in developing AI platforms for robotics and autonomy. Yet many of those educated in Pittsburgh were often poached by Silicon Valley tech firms, draining the region’s intellectual talent.
“You’d think we’d be the epicenter for related commercialization and job growth,” Doven says. “Pittsburgh has lagged behind other cities given the current state of job growth.”
Doven and others want to change that, pointing to a transition that’s already in motion but one that has remained mostly under the radar. “I noticed a year ago an increase of AI companies coming into Bakery Square,” she says. Many outside the AI industry, however, don’t have a grasp on the opportunities that abound in the region.
The answer was to create a working group composed of approximately 20 academic, civic and industry leaders that could formulate a plan to market Pittsburgh as an international hub for AI.
“We weren’t doing enough to tell our story to keep people here,” Doven says. “We’re not going to lose the moment now.”
The effort culminated in the AI Horizons Pittsburgh Summit, a conference held Oct. 14 that brought together tech stakeholders from all over the world to highlight AI opportunities in the region. “It caught the eyes of the tech world on Pittsburgh,” she says.
Doven says that the conference was an effort to form an in-depth analysis and action plan of how Pittsburgh can leverage its resources from institutions such as Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh and retain and further build the city into an AI juggernaut.
Among the key pieces is energy, Doven says. “AI gobbles energy like no other industry,” she says.
Pittsburgh, Doven says, has a large inventory of former industrial sites that are situated along high-speed fiber routes that connect directly with business districts and innovation corridors. These sites, she emphasizes, could be transformed into data centers, or “AI factories,” that can drive artificial intelligence technology. “If you transform these steel sites into AI factories, you can power the regional economy as well.”
Doven says the next step is to form an AI Strike Team, a group that can harness resources to secure capital investment, and state and federal dollars toward developing AI technology. One market to explore is the defense sector.
“The biggest opportunity is in defense AI,” she says, especially through robotics. The U.S. Army Artificial Intelligence Unit, for example, relocated to a 13,000-square-foot space at Bakery Square, leased by Carnegie Mellon University. Investment in artificial intelligence across the defense industries could attract “trillions” of dollars over the next decade, Doven says, and wants to make sure that Pittsburgh is on the leading edge.
Doven relates that AI touches just about every business sector, which opens endless possibilities to attract AI companies that serve numerous industries – from finance and health care to manufacturing and education.
“We need to drive this fast forward,” she says. “We need to take the bull by the horns and get moving.”
ENTER NVIDIA
Among the highlights at the AI Horizons summit was the announcement that San Francisco-based Nvidia, one of the world’s leading AI computing chip firms, has signed a memorandum of understanding to create a joint research center with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.
Under the memorandum, Nvidia, Carnegie Mellon and Pitt will partner in what is a first-of-its kind AI Tech Community. “They could have chosen anywhere in the world to place their first AI Tech Community,” Doven says. “They chose Pittsburgh.”
Carnegie Mellon will work with Nvidia on developing new AI technology in robotics and autonomy, while the University of Pittsburgh will engage in research involving education and health care.
Gov. Josh Shapiro said during the event Oct. 14 that the partnership is “an example of how Pennsylvania is working to bring industry leaders together to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits of artificial intelligence.”
Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor of research at the University of Pittsburgh, says Nvidia seeks to identify the next applications for AI. “We have a large, highly ranked health sciences enterprise,” as well as a school of medicine, nursing, dentistry and public health. “One thing is clear is that AI is going to disrupt medicine in a gigantic way, in terms of being able to diagnose things, potential opportunities in therapeutics,” he says.
Nvidia will also work with Pitt on exploring AI and its use in K-12 education, Rutenbar says, and how educators can introduce AI into the classroom and use it as an effective learning tool. “Perhaps intentional exposure and thoughtful preparation will be what we need,” he says. “Those are broad areas that we’re having really interesting conversations about with our Nvidia partners.”
Rutenbar says a major benefit for Pitt and Carnegie Mellon is that the partners will have access to Nvidia’s full software network. “That’s a big piece of the secret sauce for them,” he says. “They are so big and are a part of so many verticals – they have built useful components across different segments. We can get people in the game so much faster.”
Pittsburgh’s selection as a Nvidia Tech Community immediately stirred envy from cities across the country, many asking Nvidia’s executives, ‘Why Pittsburgh?’, Rutenbar says. “The minute they made this announcement, leadership inboxes were filled with irritated emails from a bunch of other cities saying, ‘What about us?’”
Rich Fitzgerald, executive director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission, says the existence of two major research institutions, plus a reliable supply of energy resources across the region, makes Pittsburgh an ideal place to develop an AI cluster community.
“Electrification is important,” he says, nodding to Gov. Shapiro’s support of restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility and the ubiquitous reserves of natural gas in the Marcellus shale, which is used to fuel combined cycle electrical power plants.
“Nobody in the country has those resources,” Fitzgerald says. Plus, the cost of living in the Pittsburgh region is lower than in communities on the East or West coasts. “It’s way below what you’ll pay in Silicon Valley or Boston,” he says.
Nvidia’s partnership only enhances Pittsburgh’s reputation as a center of innovation. “Carnegie Mellon invented AI here and it continues to be developed here,” he says. “Nvidia is huge. They’re one of the biggest in the country planting their flag in Pittsburgh. You can see, we’re just at the beginning of the boom.”
Pictured at top: Bakery Square is the cornerstone of AI Avenue in Pittsburgh. The building formerly housed a Nabisco bakery.