Amazon is investing in a large-scale natural-gas-burning power plant as part of a huge data center in Texas, the company confirmed Friday, a facility that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States.
Amazon and other tech giants are racing to build enough data centers to keep up with surging demand for artificial intelligence services and to secure the electricity to power them. A company spokesperson said in a statement that its planned data center in Pecos County would be “powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.”
The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.
Amazon has been struggling to meet its promise that it would effectively eliminate its planet-warming emissions by 2040 as part of the Climate Pledge, a voluntary agreement among companies that Amazon co-founded several years ago. Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are the main driver of global warming, which is dangerously heating the planet.
Amazon’s emissions have gone up each of the past several years. The Seattle-based tech giant has acknowledged that rising emissions from AI data centers could get in the way of its climate goals.
“The world looks different now than when we cofounded the climate pledge,” said Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson. Still, “our commitment hasn’t changed,” she said.
The Texas project seemed to epitomize the difficulty in meeting the goal.
Artificial intelligence data centers require immense amounts of energy to run the trillions of calculations needed to create AI systems and services. And the scale and urgency of their energy demands are fast exhausting the electricity-generating capacity of the nation’s power grid.
To avoid years of potential delays in hooking up to electrical utilities, data-center developers are increasingly choosing to build their own dedicated, on-site power plants instead. And gas-burning plants are usually the fastest and easiest to build.
President Donald Trump has supported the construction of power plants like these for data centers and has emphasized “energy dominance” by promoting oil, natural gas, and coal over renewable power like solar and wind. Last year, Trump issued an executive order designed to make it easier to build and operate data centers, and since then federal agencies have introduced policies designed to fast-track their construction.
Amazon said it had recently acquired the Pecos County site, where a developer is building the gas-burning plant. The plant would use 35 natural-gas turbines to generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power to feed to Amazon’s planned data center, according to permits for the project.
The plant would not initially connect to the wider electricity grid, Callahan said. The site is in a remote part of West Texas near the state’s major natural-gas-producing regions. Callahan added that the company was also exploring the use of solar energy and battery storage at the data center, which she said would create thousands of new jobs. The tech company did not disclose how much it had paid.
The power plant “could be a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” said Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, a company that tracks data-center energy infrastructure that on Friday reported Amazon’s involvement in the project.
Before this year, Amazon had powered its data centers with electricity from traditional utilities, which usually draw on a combination of fossil fuel generation and clean energy sources, Thomas said. The AI boom is changing that. “We’re going to see an explosion of off-grid gas projects” in Texas and elsewhere, he said.
Environmental groups said the scale of the plant would be damaging both for local air pollution and for the climate. “It’s going to absolutely have a huge impact on the environment, and on public health,” said Kathryn Guerra, a campaign director at Public Citizen, a corporate watchdog that has opposed data center projects.
While the plant is permitted to release about 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, facilities don’t usually emit the maximum amounts allowed under their permits. Still, the permits provide the plant with ample room to exceed the emissions of the most polluting plant in the United States, the coal-burning James H. Miller Jr. Power Plant in Quinton, Alabama, which emits about 16 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Coal burns dirtier than gas per unit of electricity generated. However, Amazon’s planned power plant is far larger in scale. Both gas- and coal-burning power plants also release smog-forming pollutants that can contribute to heart disease, asthma, and other health problems.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
