The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.
And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.
According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.
Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.
