Five years ago, Big Tech was telling the world it would be carbon-neutral. Now Microsoft is building a five-gigawatt gas plant in West Texas with Chevron.
Something changed.
Microsoft, with Chevron and Engine No. 1, is putting up a gas plant in West Texas that could scale to five gigawatts. Google is working with Crusoe on a 933-megawatt facility in North Texas, and Meta is bolting seven more gas plants onto its Hyperion data center in Louisiana.
For context, Meta's Louisiana site alone is on track for 7.46 gigawatts of power - enough to run the entire state of South Dakota.
These are not small bets. They are the kind of infrastructure decisions that lock in fuel use for decades.
The reason is simple: AI data centers need a wall of electricity, every hour of every day. Wait times for renewable projects to hook into the grid have stretched into years, so gas can come online faster.
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The catch is that building a new gas plant is no longer cheap, with BloombergNEF reporting the cost of a combined-cycle gas plant rose to $2,157 per kilowatt last year - up 66% from 2023.
Build times are 23% longer, and gas turbines themselves are the bottleneck. Wood Mackenzie expects turbine prices to be nearly triple their 2019 level by the end of 2026.
Some manufacturers are not even taking new orders until 2028, with delivery dates stretching into the early 2030s.
Natural gas already makes up about 40% of US power, so the more Big Tech locks in gas to run AI, the more tightly home power bills get tied to gas prices.
Planned non-renewable additions to the US grid jumped 71% from 2025 to 2026, while renewables grew just 2% in that same window. The shift is showing up in emissions too, with Google's reported emissions up nearly 50% over the first five years of its climate goals and Meta's up more than 60%.
A Cornell analysis estimates the data center buildout could add 44 million metric tons of CO2 by 2030 - about the same as 10 million extra cars on the road.
Not everyone is pivoting the same way, with Google also funding long-duration batteries from Form Energy that can discharge for over 100 hours.
The AI race is being run on gas.
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