Fossil gas, once considered a bridge fuel as coal plants retired and renewables expanded, is dominating development pipelines for the largest AI data centers in the U.S. Over the last year, most major data center developers have placed big bets on gas. Major financial institutions and the Trump administration itself, which plans to lease federal land for the 9.2 gigawatts of gas capacity SoftBank’s SB Energy is planning to build for OpenAI data centers in Ohio, are backing the push.
In the first half of this year, the U.S. nearly doubled the gas-fired capacity it is developing to directly power data centers. That data was released just a week before the latest report from the United Nations found that the world has shot past its goal of limiting warming and now must focus on ways to limit the “overshoot.”
The dash for gas stems from multi-year interconnection queues, transmission backlogs, and the firm power demands of AI workloads, compounded by intermittency and capacity accreditation problems for renewables. Climate and clean energy goals have taken a back seat to speed to power, as tech giants race to secure any available firm electrons, accepting fossil generation as an immediate necessity — though no one seems to know where that ends.
