Amazon data center. Credit: Amazon
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The use of AI is growing exponentially month by month and day by day, but people differ about its value. Some say it can diagnose medical conditions better than any human doctor and at far less cost. One of our regular readers says it has helped him solve complex mathematical problems. On the other hand, it is being used to denigrate women by letting leering men create images of them wearing few if any clothes — Elon Musk’s xAI seems fixated on doing precisely that. Out of the public eye, governments are relying on AI to surveil their citizens and identify those who may need to be detained in the name of “national security.”
No matter what your opinion of AI might be, there is no argument about the amount of electrical power that will be required to run all of those data centers. A report this month by the Environmental Integrity Project claims the US is planning to build or expand 74 methane-fired generating stations to power the data centers that are expected to come online in the next few years. In December 2025, Bloomberg reported that data center power demand could hit 106 gigawatts by 2035, a 36 percent jump from the previous outlook published just seven months earlier. One gigawatt of power capacity can power a medium sized city of 750,000 homes.
