U.S. Gas Power Pipeline for AI Data Centers Has Nearly Doubled In Less Than a Year, New Research Finds
New research released Tuesday shows the total volume of gas-fired electricity capacity being developed specifically for U.S. data centers has nearly doubled in under 12 months. The findings lay bare how heavily major technology companies have come to rely on private fossil fuel plants to power their operations, and just how fast rising energy demand from artificial intelligence has reshaped domestic energy development.
Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an independent energy research firm, tracks U.S. gas power projects that are proposed, in early development, or under active construction. Back in January, the organization reported that gas capacity dedicated solely to data centers hit 97 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2025 — a staggering jump from just 4 GW recorded in early 2024. In its updated analysis published Tuesday, GEM now confirms that as of mid-2026, this planned project pipeline has climbed to more than 189 GW. For context, one gigawatt of capacity is enough to power roughly one million average U.S. homes.
“Increasingly, the expansion of U.S. gas-fired power is directly tied to the boom in data center construction — you cannot discuss one without addressing the other,” said Jenny Martos, a GEM research analyst who worked on the report.
Over the past two years, data center developers have increasingly turned to private on-site power facilities, called behind-the-meter plants, to skip the long wait times for connections to public utility grids. This strategy also helps avoid passing higher energy costs onto regular residential ratepayers, a flashpoint issue that has fueled growing local opposition to new data centers across the country.
The Trump administration has actively encouraged tech firms to source their own power, launching a voluntary pledge that has been signed by major industry players including Microsoft, Meta, Google, and OpenAI, as well as multiple Republican state governors and some of the nation’s largest utility companies.
Adding this much new natural gas capacity comes with steep climate costs, particularly because many of these new facilities are built with low-efficiency turbines that push greenhouse gas emissions even higher. As WIRED has previously reported, some of these gas plants are legally permitted to release more annual greenhouse gas pollution than many small- and medium-sized countries produce overall.
GEM also tracks energy development across the globe, including in China, the world’s largest importer of natural gas. Most of China’s natural gas is used to manufacture goods like fertilizer and plastics, and the country operates a relatively modest fleet of gas-fired power plants. Even so, China saw a sharp surge in new gas facility development in recent years, and even outpaced the U.S. in new gas plant construction in the early 2020s. But the U.S. data center boom has pushed the U.S. back into first place for the largest volume of gas projects in the development pipeline, per GEM’s analysis.
This shift highlights that China — which the Trump administration has repeatedly framed as the U.S.’s top rival in the global AI race — is taking a vastly different approach to powering its own growing data center sector, relying far less on gas-fired energy. “Overall, China’s data center boom is really oriented around renewables, especially solar and hydropower,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Most new data centers built in China are sited in rural regions that already have excess renewable energy generation capacity.
Chan noted that while there have been some small efforts to develop private power for Chinese data centers, these remain limited to smaller, scattered projects. He added that China’s large-scale buildout of grid-connected renewables is a deliberate policy choice by the government to boost domestic energy independence.
For the U.S., building gas-fired power to meet data center demand “may make economic sense in the near term, particularly if you want to get these data centers online fast and don’t have access to the same scale of cheap renewables that you can get in China,” Chan explained. “But over the long term, you pay a price for that — obviously in terms of emissions, but also by failing to invest in your own domestic clean energy sector.”
Martos cautions that not every planned project GEM tracked will ultimately be completed. Many of the projects in the pipeline have not yet broken ground. “There’s a lot of uncertainty: financing, local opposition, development moratoriums, supply chain constraints for turbine equipment — there are so many factors that can stop a project,” she said. Even so, she warned, “if all of these get built, you’re locking in excess emissions for decades.”
