It can be hard to understand in a world of soda cans and smartphones that there was a time when aluminum was rarer than diamonds. That changed in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t that aluminum was scarce in the earth. It was that turning it into usable metal was nearly impossible. That shifted when Charles Martin Hall discovered a workable electrolytic process in 1886. Two years later, in 1888, the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. was formed to commercialize it. In 1907, it became the Aluminum Company of America. Eventually, the name was shortened to Alcoa.
While steel became synonymous with Pittsburgh, aluminum was the other silvery metal that helped define the region. It made aircraft and automobiles lighter, packaging cheaper and construction more flexible. It changed manufacturing in ways that now feel ordinary only because they were so complete.
Now, another defining change is emerging. The Pittsburgh-founded company that helped drive that manufacturing revolution is preparing to sell 10 closed or curtailed industrial sites for use as data centers.
None of those sites appears to be in Pennsylvania. The New Kensington Technical Center is not on the block. The landscape of Western Pennsylvania is not being reshaped by this particular decision.
But the symbolism is around every corner.
Aluminum once represented a breakthrough in how the physical world could be built. It required enormous research and vast power. It demanded new infrastructure. It promised a future that seemed almost fantastical — and then made those visions achievable.
Data centers represent a similar shift — not in girders and airframes but in algorithms and artificial intelligence.
They are the forges of the digital age. Instead of coal-fueled furnaces, they consume immense amounts of electricity. They anchor substations and fiber networks. They sit on large tracts of land and quietly support an economy most people never see.
Western Pennsylvania has long been in the business of building scaffolding for other places. First it was steel skeletons and aluminum airframes. The region refined raw materials into the structures that allowed cities to rise and industries to expand.
The scaffolding is changing. The support structures now exist in cyberspace. Instead of molten metal, there are server racks. Instead of smokestacks, there are cooling systems. The output is measured not in tons but in terabytes.
But infrastructure is still infrastructure, whether it carries cars across a river or data across the globe.
When a company born in the Industrial Revolution sees greater opportunity in preparing land for artificial intelligence than in restarting smelters, it reflects a broader shift in how the economy is built. Aluminum once seemed like a marvel that would reshape everything. In many ways, it did.
Artificial intelligence carries the same aura of transformation today. There are questions about what these changes mean — for the economy, for the environment, for daily life.
This is a story not just of invention but of reinvention. And even if this latest chapter unfolds far from Pennsylvania’s river valleys, it is another reminder that the region has always stood at the edge of industrial change — not merely watching it, but helping to shape the structures that hold it up.