It’s a new heyday for gas thanks to data centers

The US is now main a world surge in new fuel energy crops being constructed largely to fulfill rising vitality demand for information facilities. And extra fuel means extra planet-heating air pollution.

Fuel-fired energy technology in improvement globally rose by 31 % in 2025. Nearly 1 / 4 of that added capability is slated for the US, which has surpassed China with the largest improve of any nation. Greater than a 3rd of that development within the US is anticipated to immediately energy information facilities, based on a latest analysis by the nonprofit World Power Monitor (GEM).

The frenzy to put in extra highly effective {hardware} into increasing information facilities used for generative AI has led to forecasts of skyrocketing power demand. There’s nonetheless lots of uncertainty about whether or not AI will turn into as ingrained in on a regular basis life as tech corporations may like, and plenty of proposed information facilities may fall flat. Even so, plans to construct out extra fuel crops within the identify of AI are stalling efforts to transition to cleaner vitality sources.

“There’s a danger that this capability may lock in future emissions and turn into stranded belongings if anticipated electrical energy demand from AI by no means materializes,” Jenny Martos, undertaking supervisor for GEM’s World Oil and Fuel Plant Tracker, said in a press release.

Already, 2026 is shaping as much as be a record-smashing yr for fuel. If all of this yr’s proposed initiatives cross the end line, it could be a good larger bounce in added capability than the report set in 2002. That’s fairly exceptional contemplating the 2000s ushered in America’s so-called “shale gas revolution,” when fracking immediately unleashed previously hard-to-reach reserves. Fuel is now a less expensive energy supply than coal and creates much less carbon air pollution when burned. However fuel manufacturing releases methane, a stronger greenhouse fuel than carbon dioxide despite the fact that it doesn’t persist within the ambiance for as lengthy.

Ramping up electrical energy technology from fuel can be a pointy pivot away from international local weather objectives. A decade in the past, almost each nation on Earth — together with its two greatest greenhouse fuel polluters, China and the US — signed a historic deal in Paris to restrict international warming. The one strategy to obtain essentially the most formidable objectives set out within the Paris settlement could be to exchange fossil fuels with less-polluting alternate options like renewable vitality and slash greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by round 2050.