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While nuclear energy is often presented as the potential 'clean' solution for powering the vast number of US data centers currently under construction, the reality is that other, less sustainable energy solutions are often used to plug the gap.
Wired has been examining air permits for several new natural gas projects linked to 11 data center campuses, and has determined they have the potential to emit more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco in 2024. And unfortunately, the news mostly gets worse from there.
To take one of many examples from the report, Microsoft is said to be looking into purchasing power from a natural gas project in West Texas. According to its permit, the Chevron-backed project could emit more than 11.5 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. As Wired notes, that's more than the yearly emissions of the island nation of Jamaica.
Or how about the gas turbines used to power xAI's Grok-crunching data centers? The Colossus campus in Memphis and the Colossus 2 campus in nearby Southaven could, according to the permits, potentially generate more than 6.4 million tons of CO2 equivalents, each, per year. That would be the rough equivalency of 30 average-sized natural gas plant emission figures.
And then there's the Stargate Project, an OpenAI-led multicompany venture to create multiple data center campuses across several US states.
Permit documents for just three Stargate-affiliated natural gas projects reportedly show they have a combined potential to emit more than 24 million tons of greenhouse gases—again, in a single year. That's more than Costa Rica, and slightly less than Croatia, if you were wondering.
Wired's estimates are based on the maximum listed emissions, so there's always hope to be found in the idea that some of these projects might not hit these figures in practice. Running continuously at full capacity, for example, would be unusual for a standard, grid-connected power plant.
Alex Schott, the director of communications for an oil and gas company building three power plants for Meta, told the outlet that these sorts of estimates "represent a theoretical, conservative scenario, not the actual projected emissions", and that the actual figures could be "potentially two-thirds less than what's on the paper."
Wired ran the numbers, and found that if the total emissions ended up being half the maximum figures shown on the permits, the combined gas power infrastructure would still create more greenhouse gas emissions in a single year than Norway did in 2024. Again, that's infrastructure linked to just 11 data center campus examples.
And energy researcher Jon Koomey told the outlet that data center-specific gas plants may behave differently. A permit application submitted in November notes that traditional power plants have to respond to the demands of a constantly varying grid. "At the data center, the power requirements do not vary significantly," the application says.
Koomey also says that, as highly efficient gas turbines are in short supply (like most things connected with the AI boom), some developers are already considering less efficient models, which will need to run longer and create more emissions.
While many of the companies contacted by Wired describe the situation as something of a stopgap while clean power catches up—and US president Donald Trump has signed an executive order to accelerate nuclear power plant construction— it seems unlikely that all of these potential gas facilities would be retired once cleaner energy sources are brought online.
However, several crumbs of hope remain. Air permit applications are not a guarantee of construction, for a start.
And given global instability at the moment regarding the supply chains of, well, just about everything to do with AI data centers, from memory to power plant equipment, it's possible that data center growth may eventually slow enough for clean energy to catch up. Or that many of these proposed facilities may no longer be needed for other reasons.
Still, it's pretty sobering stuff. As the founder of energy research firm Cleanview Michael Thomas puts it: "It's almost like we thought we were on the downside of the industrial revolution, retiring coal and gas, and now we have a new hump where we're going to rise.
"That terrifies me in a lot of ways."
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