Amazon is building a new AI data center in Texas that could become the country’s largest source of carbon emissions
A data center facility being constructed by Amazon.com Inc. to host workloads for Amazon Web Services is set to become the single-largest source of pollution in the entire U.S., according to a report by the New York Times Saturday.
The company, which already operates more data center facilities globally than any other organization, has secured all of the necessary permits for the project, which will be powered by a natural gas plant located at the same site in Pecos County, Texas. According to those permits, the new plant will be equipped with 35 natural gas turbines capable of generating up to 7.65 gigawatts of power.
To generate that energy, the gas has to be burned, which is why the facility has been authorized to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, more than any other power plant in the entire country, the report said.
Amazon is proceeding with the construction of the massive data center and power plant despite continuing to insist that it will meet an earlier promise to become fully carbon-neutral. In 2019, the company pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across its global business operations by 2040 at the latest, at the same time as it co-founded a project called The Climate Pledge. The initiative is a voluntary coalition of more than 700 companies and their partners, which aims to encourage the world’s biggest corporations to eliminate their carbon footprints.
