This post was originally published on the Cleanview newsletter, which I also write.

Data center developers are building their own gas power plants rather than wait years for a grid connection. In June, we published our second report on this trend. At the time, developers had announced about 90 GW of behind-the-meter generation, roughly nine New York Cities’ worth of power.

Our original plan was to publish a quarterly report on this topic. But we soon realized this was too infrequent given the speed at which this trend was evolving.

To illustrate what we mean, consider a few data points:

• The amount of operating behind-the-meter capacity has nearly doubled since we published our last report.

• Capacity under construction has roughly quadrupled.

• Anthropic has gone from an insignificant buyer of behind-the-meter gas power to one of the largest.

So we decided to scrap our original plan and build something much better. Today we’re excited to announce Cleanview’s live behind-the-meter gas plant tracker. It covers more than 100 gas plants built to power data centers, and we update it every day.

What’s included

For each behind-the-meter gas plant, we now show:

• The data center campus it powers, and the plant’s developer

• Every generating unit: its technology (simple-cycle turbine, reciprocating engine, combined cycle or fuel cell), manufacturer, model, unit count and nameplate capacity

• The status of each unit (Announced, Permitted, Under construction, Operating or Canceled) and the year it’s expected to come online

• Firm output, the power a plant can actually deliver to its data center, where a developer or permit discloses it

• The plant’s location, air permit and primary sources

All of this data is available in our data platform, CSV exports, and API.

Satellite images

On our data platform, we also provide satellite images of all the projects we track. Below is an example of a project that recently began operating despite receiving almost no media attention. It’s one of the largest behind-the-meter projects operating in the country.

Equipment library

In our research on this topic, we’ve come across some power strategies that have surprised us. Some developers are using mobile gas generators strapped to semitrucks. Others are using aeroderivative turbines originally designed for aircraft and warships.

To better understand these power strategies we built an equipment library with illustrated 3D models of every piece of power generation equipment at the behind-the-meter data centers we track.

We could have just captured this in a spreadsheet. But sometimes seeing is believing. We also think it’s the little things that make for a great product experience. (At least that’s how we’re justifying the countless hours spent on these illustrations to Rory in finance).

Documents and sources

In our research, we often collect dozens of documents for a given project—everything from air permits to SEC filings to county site plans. These documents are difficult to find but include a treasure trove of information.

In our behind-the-meter data subscription, we include all relevant source files we come across in our research.

Chat with us to learn more

Over the coming weeks, we plan to share insights from this growing dataset. In the meantime, if you’d like to see a demo of the new BTM tracker or connect with our team, send us a note.

Connect with our team

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Data centers have become one of the biggest issues of the 2026 midterms. Since January, campaigns and outside groups have spent more than $45 million on ads that mention data centers, according to an NPR analysis of AdImpact data.

In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown is running ads that call Republican Sen. Jon Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.” In Michigan, Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers backs a one-year moratorium on new data centers. In Texas, both Senate candidates want to end the state’s sales tax break for data centers.

But the near-term future of data centers in America won’t be determined by Congressional midterm elections. Instead, the fate of America’s AI buildout depends on races further down the ballot.

President Trump has made his support for data centers clear. Last month he wrote that towns fighting data centers are choosing to be “backwards and poor.” When Texas’ Governor, Greg Abbott, paused data center approvals in August, Trump called the decision “a mistake.” The President’s support and veto power would make it difficult for Congress to pass any meaningful legislation that regulates data center development.

At the state level, the picture is very different. Governors and state legislators have significant power to block, slow, or otherwise regulate data center development. They can pass moratoriums, strip tax breaks, appoint new utility regulators, and require more stringent environmental and labor standards.

In our latest report, we found that ten close governor’s races will set the rules for 67.4 GW of planned data centers. That’s more than the 62.7 GW of data centers operating in the entire US today. We estimate that this represents more than $2 trillion of potential AI infrastructure investment.

None of these projects have started construction yet, which means the next governor could still decide whether, and on what terms, they get built.

In Ohio, both candidates have suggested a pause

No state with a close governor’s race has more planned data center capacity than Ohio. Developers have announced 21.9 GW of data centers there that haven’t yet broken ground. The Columbus area is already one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the country.

Both candidates for governor say they’d slow that growth down. Republican Vivek Ramaswamy says that on his first day in office, he would “immediately halt the approval of any new data center projects” until his data center law passes. Under his plan, data centers would have to give nearby residents free electricity or compensation and pay full property taxes. Democrat Amy Acton backs a moratorium until data centers pay 100% of their utility costs, among other conditions.

The current governor, Mike DeWine, has already paused new data center tax exemptions.

In Georgia, candidates back very different policies

No race in the country has seen more spending on ads that mention data centers than Georgia’s race for governor where candidates have spent $12.8 million, according to NPR. Developers have announced 15.1 GW of data centers in Georgia that haven’t started construction.

Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms wants a temporary statewide pause on new data center construction. “Let us take a pause, assess fully, assess comprehensively, assess the impact that these data centers are having on our environment, on our utility bills,” she said, according to the Georgia Recorder.

Republican Rick Jackson wants to leave the decision to local officials. “Every community should decide,” he has said.

OpenAI has the most at risk

OpenAI has more data center capacity at risk this fall than any other company. Most of the data centers OpenAI is building today are in Texas, which doesn’t have a close governor’s race. But its next wave is in the states that do. OpenAI has 14.1 GW planned in states with a close governor’s race, 84% of everything it has planned.

In Pike County, Ohio, SB Energy is building a 10 GW campus for OpenAI, one of the three largest data center projects we track. It sits partly on land owned by the Department of Energy, and the US government will own the 9.2 GW of gas generation built to power it. That could limit what a new governor can do.

But the campus still depends on state approvals. SB Energy is paying $4.2 billion for new high-voltage lines through AEP Ohio, a utility overseen by regulators the governor appoints. The first 800 MW is expected online in 2028.

In Effingham County, Georgia, about 45 minutes outside Savannah, OpenAI is developing Project Camellia, a $20 billion, 3.2 GW campus. That project isn’t yet under construction. If Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms wins and follows through on her pause, the project could see significant delays. The Cook Political Report rates the election a toss up.

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about slowing down AI development and “pacing the frontier.” Many proposals laid out by labs and policymakers have focused on the speed at which models are released. Next month, voters may force a different kind of slowdown and pace the speed at which compute is built.

Get the full report

The midterms are one part of The Geography of Compute. Here’s what’s inside the full report:

• Where data center construction is moving: the established markets that are still growing, and the nine new markets with more than 1 GW under construction each

• Who is building: hyperscalers, AI labs and neocloud developers, and the states they’re expanding into

• Why developers are going to remote places and siting projects near gas pipelines instead of the high-voltage grid

• The Senate and governor’s races, House districts and candidates’ proposals that could shape the next wave of projects

• Data center capacity by state, county, utility and balancing authority, and the 50 largest campuses in the US

If you’re interested in receiving the full report, reach out to learn more about Cleanview’s research subscription. If you’re a journalist, contact us here to get a copy.

Get the report

Next week, we’re publishing The Geography of Compute, a report about where companies are building data centers in the US. Today’s story is an excerpt from that report. If you’re interested in receiving the full report, reach out to learn more about Cleanview’s research subscription. If you’re a journalist, contact us here to get an early copy.

In remote and rural places across America, tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into some of the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world. Most Americans have likely never heard of the communities soaking up this investment—places like Ellendale, North Dakota; Pecos, Texas; and Richland Parish, Louisiana. Nearly all of these places have one thing in common: They are located in states that voted for Trump.

Before the launch of ChatGPT, most data centers were built in blue states. At that time, 56% of data center capacity was located in states that Kamala Harris won by 5 points or more. Just 36% of capacity was in states that Trump won by 5 points or more. (The remainder was built in swing states.)

Since then, the trend has flipped: 60% of data center capacity under construction is in states Trump won by 5 points or more. If you exclude Virginia, the picture is even more stark: 92% of data center construction is in states that Trump won.

So why are data center developers choosing to build in red states? One reason is permitting speed. Red states are more permissive when it comes to approving large-scale infrastructure projects of all kinds. Mississippi, for example, passed a bill in 2024 that allowed utilities to build gas plants for data centers without any public or regulatory review, as we wrote about in our last newsletter. By comparison, Oregon has banned new gas plants and offers more opportunity for public input.

Another factor is the price of electricity. Red states like Texas, Ohio, and Louisiana have lower power prices than most blue states. Electricity is the largest operating cost for a data center. We found that states with below-median industrial electricity prices have 62% of the capacity currently under construction.

But the most important reason is population density. Data center developers are increasingly seeking sites in remote places like West Texas. These places tend to be conservative.

Before the generative AI era, data centers were built near population centers. That’s because most of them served internet activities that required low latency, like video calls and Netflix videos.

Today’s data centers don’t need to be sited as close to people. Many of the largest data centers are dedicated to AI training, which can be done in remote places.

We plotted data center construction sites over a map of America’s population density, and the results were striking. At the end of 2023, the typical data center had 3.1 million people living within 50 miles of it. Today, the typical data center under construction has 1.8 million people living within 50 miles. Looking ahead, we found that planned projects that aren’t yet under construction would have 1 million people living within 50 miles.

These trends could change, however. Few political issues in the US have risen in salience faster than data centers. The issue isn’t as neatly partisan as topics like climate change. Politicians from Sen. Bernie Sanders to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have voiced opposition to data centers and advocated for policies that would slow development. President Trump has been one of the biggest advocates for data centers, but many in his party have broken ranks.

Technology changes could shift where data centers are built too. As demand for inference—the process of serving large language models to users—grows, data center developers may try to site projects closer to population centers because serving users benefits from being nearby.

Crusoe, the developer most famous for its role in OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, is building some of the largest data centers in the world, located in remote parts of Texas. The company recently announced that it had raised $3.9 billion to build small, modular data centers that could be sited closer to people.

If development were to move back to dense areas, hyperscalers and AI labs would find themselves pitching a new political constituency: blue states and cities led by Democrats.

Get the full report

These are just a few of the takeaways from our upcoming report, The Geography of Compute. If you’re interested in receiving the full report, reach out to learn more about Cleanview’s research subscription. If you’re a journalist, contact us here to get an early copy.

Connect with our team

Read more

This post was originally published on the Cleanview newsletter, which I also write. It is an excerpt from Cleanview’s recently published report about how Amazon is powering its data centers in the AI era. You can get the full report or a free preview here.

In the spring of 2024, Amazon began construction on what would soon become the world’s largest data center, located in New Carlisle, Indiana. Just 18 months later, the company declared the first buildings operational with roughly 500,000 of its Trainium2 chips running inside. Another 6 months later, the campus passed 1 GW.

No company had ever built so much compute so quickly. And Amazon did it without building any new power plants or high-voltage transmission lines.

With Amazon paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the local utility and little infrastructure investment required, the New Carlisle data center enabled the local utility to actually cut residential utility bills. Last month, Indiana Michigan Power announced that it was cutting rates by $100 per year for the typical household in its territory.

By using transmission lines and grid capacity built during the coal era, Amazon achieved a rare trifecta: It built 1 GW of compute in record time; it did so at a remarkably low cost; and its new demand on existing lines helped the local utility lower electricity rates for residents.

Amazon has been explicit that this is its preferred development model since it allows the company to build campuses “without triggering the long-lead multi-year inter- and intra-state transmission build out process.”

But in recent years, as demand for compute has exploded, it’s become harder for Amazon to identify data center sites where this is possible. Existing infrastructure only supports giga-scale data center development in so many places.

Everywhere else, Amazon needs someone to build new firm power generation. And in the AI era, that has meant one thing: new natural gas power plants.

Amazon’s growing gas portfolio

Last month, Cleanview broke the news that Amazon is planning to build a 7.65 GW natural gas power plant in West Texas to power a data center campus. In our latest report on Amazon’s power strategy, we identified seven more power plants linked to the company’s data centers.

Altogether, utilities and independent power producers are building 17.5 GW of new gas generation to serve Amazon’s growing power needs. That’s roughly 1.5 times as much power as New York City consumes at its peak in a given year.

Earlier this month, Amazon filed plans for a 36 building campus in Pennsylvania that will be powered by the 4.5 GW Homer City natural gas power plant.

A group of developers proposed the Homer City natural gas power plant more than a year ago. It was one of the projects featured in our behind-the-meter data center report. In a series of press releases, the company announced that it had secured seven GE Vernova combined cycle turbines, gas pipeline deals, and EPC construction labor.

But there were reasons to be skeptical of the project: Mainly, it didn’t have a customer for the power. Amazon’s deal changes that.

Satellite images show that the gas power plant recently began construction. The developers have said they expect the first turbines to begin producing power in 2027.

How Amazon is powering its campuses in Mississippi

In January 2024, the Mississippi legislature convened for a special session dedicated to attracting data centers to the state. Over two days, legislators passed three bills. The bills applied to any data center company investing at least $10 billion in the state. The next day, Amazon announced a $10 billion investment in Mississippi.

One of the bills, SB 2001, exempted Entergy’s supply contract with Amazon from Public Service Commission review. It also let the utility build new power plants and transmission lines without a certificate of public convenience and necessity, the review that normally tests whether a plant is needed and reasonably priced.

In order to track data centers and power projects, Cleanview often reviews these types of public records. When we went searching the docket in Mississippi, we found virtually nothing. But we suspected that the utility would need to build new gas plants given the scale of Amazon’s buildout in the state.

Using satellites and local government permits, we identified dozens of Amazon data centers under development in Mississippi. By the end of 2027, we expect Amazon to have 1.5 GW of capacity in the state. Where, we wondered, would that power come from?

Ultimately we found three new gas plants under development that will serve Amazon’s Mississippi campuses. Entergy didn’t have to file permits with state regulators, but they did have to mention it to investors in SEC filings, which created a paper trail we could follow further.

We learned that Entergy is investing $3.4 billion to build 2.3 GW of new gas generation capacity to serve Amazon’s new load. The utility also plans to build 270 MW of new solar generation.

This unorthodox deal structure and special session bill enabled what Amazon, and every hyperscaler crave most: speed. A year ago, Amazon didn’t have a single data center operating in Mississippi. By the end of next year, the state will house one of the company’s largest compute clusters.

Get the full report

These are just a few of the many takeaways from our comprehensive analysis of Amazon’s data center power strategy. Here’s what’s inside the full report:

• Data file covering 825 US Amazon data centers across 149 campuses, including the exact location, power capacity, square footage, status, and operating year.

• Amazon’s operating, under construction and planned capacity by state

• A breakdown of Amazon’s contracted power by energy type

• The 8 gas plants that will power Amazon’s future data centers

• How Amazon contracts with clean energy developers

• Case studies on Amazon’s power strategy in Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Indiana, and Texas

• How Amazon built the largest data center in the world without building any new power plants

• The transmission lines that could make or break Amazon’s data center plans

You can purchase the full report, download a free preview, or learn more about our research subscriptions by clicking the button below.

Get the report

This post was originally published on the Cleanview newsletter, which I also write. I’m sharing it here with Distilled readers given that I think many of you will be interested in the topic.

Amazon is building more data centers than any company in the world. In the United States, the company now consumes more electricity than the federal government. Over the next decade, Amazon plans to more than quadruple its data center capacity.

Today we’re publishing our report on how Amazon plans to power all of its data centers in the US. Over the last few months, we’ve read through hundreds of utility filings, air permits, county records and interconnection studies. This work has already led to important discoveries like the news that we broke about Amazon’s planned 7.65 GW natural gas power plant in West Texas.

While the scale of Amazon’s West Texas gas plant is staggering, it only scratches the surface of the company’s growing power fleet. We found more than 40 GW of power deals between Amazon and its partners.

Our team tracks data centers every day and even we were surprised by what we learned in this research. Here’s some of what we found:

Amazon has nearly doubled its footprint in just a few years

When ChatGPT launched and ushered in the generative AI era, Amazon operated 7.4 GW of data center capacity in the US. Since then, the company has nearly doubled its footprint.

No other company comes close to Amazon’s lead as the largest data center operator. Amazon has 69% more capacity than the next hyperscaler, Microsoft, and roughly double Google and Meta’s capacity.

Amazon is spending big to keep its lead. The company expects to spend $220 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, which is 3.5 times what it spent in 2022. Most of that money will go to data centers and the chips inside them.

The speed and scale of this buildout is visible from space. In the satellite images below, you can see Amazon’s New Carlisle campus in March 2024 and March 2026. In just two years, the company built the world’s largest data center—a 1 GW campus dedicated to its customer, Anthropic.1

Amazon’s old power playbook broke

Up until 2022, Amazon built nearly all of its US data center capacity in three states: Virginia, Oregon, and Ohio. Each state hosts one of AWS’s three main US regions.

Amazon’s playbook to power those data centers was relatively simple. It signed standard commercial and industrial service contracts with utilities that had available grid capacity, then matched its electricity consumption with renewable PPAs. Utilities rarely, if ever, had to build new power plants to serve the company.

That playbook worked for 15 years. But it stopped working in all three of its primary data center markets within a two-year window. In Virginia, Ohio, and Oregon, utilities that served Amazon for more than a decade simply ran out of power.

Since then, the company has started development in 13 new states. 27 GW of the 44 GW now under development is in those new markets. Texas alone has 7.6 GW in the pipeline, and Pennsylvania has 5 GW.

“The Everything Store” is buying every kind of power it can

No company in America has contracted more carbon-free electricity than Amazon. The company has contracted 25.6 GW of carbon-free electricity in the US, including 17.9 GW of solar and 4.4 GW of wind. It has also bought more nuclear power than any other hyperscaler, including 1,920 MW from the Susquehanna plant in Pennsylvania and 1,200 MW from Comanche Peak in Texas.

Amazon’s sustainability reports mention these deals often. But the company also has a large and growing gas power fleet it doesn’t talk about much publicly.

Utilities and independent power producers are building 17.5 GW of new gas generation to serve Amazon’s growing power needs. GW Ranch, the planned 7.65 GW gas plant in West Texas, is just one of 8 gas power plants that will serve Amazon’s data center load.

Get the full report

These are just a few of the many takeaways from our comprehensive analysis of Amazon’s data center power strategy. Here’s what’s inside the full report:

• Data file covering 825 US Amazon data centers across 149 campuses, including the exact location, power capacity, square footage, status, and operating year.

• Amazon’s operating, under construction and planned capacity by state

• A breakdown of Amazon’s contracted power by energy type

• The 8 gas plants that will power Amazon’s future data centers

• How Amazon contracts with clean energy developers

• Case studies on Amazon’s power strategy in Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Indiana, and Texas

• How Amazon built the largest data center in the world without building any new power plants

• The transmission lines that could make or break Amazon’s data center plans

You can purchase the full report, download a free preview, or learn more about our research subscriptions by clicking the button below.

Get the report

Last winter, Puget Sound Energy, one of the largest utilities in the Pacific Northwest, tried to purchase one of America’s largest solar and storage projects out of bankruptcy. Facing a power squeeze, the utility saw something rare in the Sunstone Solar and Storage project: 1.2 gigawatts of shovel-ready solar generation and 7.2 GWh of battery capacity—enough to power millions of homes.

But after 16 rounds of bidding, Puget Sound learned that it had been outbid—not by another utility, but by one of the largest tech companies in the world: Amazon.

Like other tech companies, Amazon has spent billions of dollars over the last decade paying clean energy developers for carbon-free electricity. But its purchase of Sunstone and its acquisition of the massive GW Ranch natural gas plant we reported on earlier this month are different.

In Oregon, like Texas, Amazon is beginning to look more like a traditional electric utility than a buyer of electricity. Sunstone is the first generation project the company will own, build, and operate itself. Including construction, Amazon will spend roughly $3 billion on it.

So why would a tech company become a solar developer?

Over the last few weeks, Cleanview’s team reviewed hundreds of permits, corporate filings, and other public records to find an answer to that question.

A power squeeze in the Northwest

In 2010, Amazon began building its second major compute region to power its fast-growing AWS cloud business. Like Google and Microsoft, the company was drawn by the region’s plentiful, carbon-free electricity. Some of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world offered some of the country’s lowest industrial electricity prices.

Over the next decade, the company went on a data center building spree in the region. Between 2013 and 2024, the company built 40 data centers in Eastern Oregon with a combined power capacity of 3.3 GW, becoming by far the region’s largest consumer of electricity.

For years, that strategy worked. But beginning in 2020, Amazon began to run into issues securing power for its new data centers.

In 2023, the company built its PDX109 campus in Boardman, Oregon with the intention of using 266 MW of power. The company built its data centers, but the utility was only able to offer 40 MW.

Amazon’s first fix was to attempt to do what so many tech companies have done since: It filed a permit to build its own on-site generation, using Bloom fuel cells, which use natural gas to generate electricity. But the state’s environmental agency signaled that it wouldn’t approve the permit due to pollution concerns.

In 2025 the company ran into more power shortage issues. Another local utility, PacifiCorp, failed to deliver enough power for multiple campuses, according to a complaint filed with the utility commission.

Months later, Amazon bought the Sunstone solar and storage project.

Why Amazon is building solar and not gas

Elsewhere in the country, hyperscalers facing grid delays have built their own natural gas power plants. Meta recently partnered with the natural gas company Williams to build more than 1 GW of capacity in New Albany, Ohio. OpenAI and Oracle are building multiple gigawatts of gas capacity across Texas and New Mexico. And, as we reported this month, Amazon itself is building one of the country’s largest gas plants in West Texas.

In Oregon, public policy prevents such a strategy: HB 2021 effectively bars companies from building new fossil fuel power plants, whether they’re a utility or hyperscaler.

In other markets, Amazon might instead turn to clean energy developers and sign a power purchase agreement (PPA). But a failure to build transmission infrastructure has limited its options.

Since 2015, clean energy developers have requested 173 GW of new generation in BPA’s interconnection queue. Just 1 GW has been built. In the region, roughly 1 MW gets connected for every 168 requested.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s primary utility in the region was never built to serve this kind of demand. Umatilla Electric, a small rural co-op, saw its residential demand grow at about 0.37% per year before Amazon came to town. Amazon’s data centers now likely use 50 times more electricity than homes and farms in the area.

Why Amazon bought Sunstone

In this context, Sunstone offered the perfect opportunity for Amazon.

Sunstone entered BPA’s interconnection queue in 2021 and sits second in line at the Longhorn substation, which is located next to Amazon’s data centers. The project is fully permitted and “shovel-ready,” removing virtually all risk for the company.

Amazon will also be able to claim more than a billion dollars in federal tax credits. Sunstone will likely qualify for a 50% tax credit that was only available if the company began construction before July 4 of this year.

In outbidding Puget Sound Energy, the company also ensured that the project’s electricity will go to its data centers and not the competing utility’s customers hundreds of miles away.

“We are used to being kind of the only buyers for these things as utilities, and now there are other buyers who are a little bigger than we are,” Matt Steuerwalt, a Puget Sound Energy executive, recently said.

Even with its multi-billion dollar investment in Sunstone, Amazon will likely find itself short of the power it wants in Oregon. Cleanview estimates that the project will generate less than 10% of the electricity Amazon wants by 2032.

Project Sunstone and GW Ranch in Texas could be the beginning of a new chapter of Amazon’s life, not just as a tech company, but as an electric utility building some of the largest infrastructure projects in the country.

The company confirmed to Cleanview that it has acquired a site in Pecos County, Texas, where it plans to build an AI data center campus powered by on-site natural gas generation. Permits for the gas plant reveal that it would use 35 turbines to generate 7.65 gigawatts of power. It would be entirely disconnected from the Texas electricity grid — at least initially.

“Amazon believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our new planned data center campus in Pecos County does just that: it’s powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families and designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.”

In January, GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States—emitting more greenhouse gases than the country’s largest coal plant. It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow.

Amazon said it remains committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 under The Climate Pledge. But the gas plant would put those goals further out of reach at a time when the company’s emissions are already rising quickly.

The company said it has enabled 10 GW of carbon-free energy across 40 projects in Texas to power its existing data center operations. Amazon said that its GW Ranch project will use non-potable, brackish groundwater—a source not suitable for irrigation or drinking water.

The paper trail linking Amazon to GW Ranch surfaced earlier this week when Amazon filed three construction permits with the state. The permits showed Amazon’s plans to build three data center buildings with construction beginning immediately. Cleanview reviewed satellite imagery to look for the project and discovered that land clearing had begun at the site described in GW Ranch’s air permit records.

We reached out to Amazon and the company confirmed it had acquired the GW Ranch site and plans to buy power from the plant, which is being developed by Pacifico Energy.

Partnering with GW Ranch marks Amazon’s first major investment in an off-grid data center. In doing so, the company joins Microsoft, Google, and Meta who have all invested significantly in natural gas power this year.

Data center developers have announced nearly 60 behind-the-meter gas power projects since the beginning of 2025 with a combined capacity of 90 GW, according to Cleanview’s latest report. Not all of these projects will be built, but in recent months a growing share of them have begun construction and signed key tenant deals.

In June, Microsoft announced that it had partnered with Chevron to build a data center campus near Pecos, Texas, that would be powered by 2 GW of off-grid natural gas. That project is located 30 miles west of GW Ranch.

Pacifico Energy has said it plans to build up to 750 MW of on-site solar generation and 1.8 GW of battery storage capacity at GW Ranch.

Prior to this year, Amazon had powered all of its data centers with grid power. But the AI boom is changing that. In a call with investors on July 30th, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy said the company’s cloud platform, AWS, grew at its fastest rate in 18 quarters due to AI demand. He added that the company has more demand for compute than it can supply with their data centers—a mismatch the company expects to persist well into next year.

Amazon’s project in West Texas is unlikely to be its last bet on large-scale natural gas power. Yesterday, the company confirmed that it is in talks with the developers of a 4.5 GW gas power plant in Homer City, Pennsylvania.

When the developers of the Homer City gas plant first announced their project, they said it would be the largest gas power plant in America. Now it’s just one of many giga-scale power plants that have been proposed across the country.

Read more about off-grid data centers

Cleanview recently published the most comprehensive analysis of behind-the-meter data centers available. We analyzed 59 behind-the-meter data center projects and the equipment powering them. The report includes detailed case studies of 15 projects with satellite imagery analysis, OEM market share breakdowns, and project timelines. It also includes the full dataset of projects and equipment.

You can read the full report on Cleanview’s website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~75-page paid version with a dataset of all the projects. We’ve also published stories on this trend to our newsletter and website that you can find here:

• Bypassing the Grid: How Data Center Developers Are Building Their Own Power Plants

• The World’s Largest Data Center Is Running Into Trouble

• Meta’s Data Center Strategy and the Mad Max Phase of the AI Boom

Editor’s note: This story is based on extensive reporting and research that I did for Cleanview’s recently published behind-the-meter data center report. The 75-page report, which has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, is the most comprehensive analysis on the trend out there. You can read the free executive summary here.

From the moment that OpenAI announced its Stargate initiative, speed was central to its strategy. Standing next to CEO Sam Altman in the White House, President Trump said the initiative would be “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” and that the administration would act with “unprecedented speed and urgency” to support it.

Trump then hinted at how the company planned to build gigawatt-scale data centers faster than anyone else. “They’ll build energy generation [at the AI data center] and that will be incredible.” Rather than wait for the utility, Stargate developers would effectively become their own utilities, building power plants “behind the utility meter.”

This strategy was as radical as it was novel. For decades data centers had been powered just like every other industrial operation in America. They called up the local utility, submitted a grid connection request, and soon after received electrons from the power grid. But the developers of Stargate believed this path to be too slow.

Between 2022 and 2024, when Stargate’s first project began construction, the number of data center power requests exploded—and the average time to connect a data center to the grid did too. In Northern Virginia, the timeline grew from two years to as much as seven years. In Ohio, the biggest utility stopped taking requests altogether after it was overwhelmed with demand.

Speed to power wasn’t the only challenge facing OpenAI. The company also believed that it needed to build data centers at a scale unlike anything in history. In a 2020 paper, OpenAI researchers—including Dario Amodei, who would eventually left to start Anthropic—popularized the concept of “scaling laws.” For all the smart techniques researchers were using to make AI models smarter, they found that the only thing that really mattered was how much compute and data you threw at the problem. The company didn’t want a 50 MW data center like the ones big tech companies had been building for the last decade; it wanted data centers with 20 to 40 times as much compute all connected in a single location by fiber optic cables. It wanted giga-scale data centers.

OpenAI decided that the only way to build that scale of data center quickly was to build its own power plants.

Five months before Stargate’s public announcement, OpenAI’s development partner, Crusoe, filed a permit in Texas to build a 360 MW power plant on the site of what would become the first Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. Six days later, it was approved. In December 2024, the company ordered 10 GE Vernova turbines, and then in June 2025, it bought another 19 units that could collectively generate more than a gigawatt of power.

Crusoe didn’t buy GE Vernova’s combined-cycle turbines that form the backbone of the US power grid today though. Instead, they turned to the company’s jet engines—or aeroderivative turbines, if you prefer the more pedestrian nomenclature.

As demand for AI exploded, lead times for combined-cycle turbines grew to as long as seven years. Burned by the gas bubble of the early 2000s, the top three manufacturers of combined-cycle turbines said they didn’t plan to expand production much to meet this demand, instead choosing to boost prices and profits. So rather than wait seven years, Crusoe bought GE Vernova’s aeroderivative turbines that were originally made for passenger airplanes.

Elsewhere OpenAI’s development partners began cooking up plans to strap gas turbines to semi-trucks and even called up one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cruise ship engines to find power equipment.

By 2025, power equipment supply chains were becoming a game of whack-a-mole. As developers like Crusoe rushed to buy aeroderivative turbines, lead times grew quickly as they had in the combined-cycle market. To build the second Stargate data center, Vantage Data Centers—another OpenAI partner—ordered more than 670 reciprocating engines to generate 2.58 GW of power in Shackleford, Texas.

Further to the West, another OpenAI partner announced plans to power a data center on the border of New Mexico and Mexico with 2.45 GW of Bloom fuel cells. Prior to the AI boom, Bloom fuel cells generally powered commercial operations at single digit megawatt scales. Project Jupiter will be 2,400 times larger than the Honda office park that Bloom prominently features on its website.

The scale of OpenAI’s buildout is hard to properly convey. No AI company has bet more aggressively on building its own power plants than OpenAI and its partners, according to Cleanview’s report on behind-the-meter data centers. Stargate developers are building 6.8 GW of their own power generation—more than the peak power demand of every city in America except New York.

At first, OpenAI’s strategy appeared to be working as expected. Crusoe began vertical construction on its first two data center buildings in Abilene, Texas in September 2024. Over the next year, thousands of people worked 24 hours a day to construct the data centers in record time. And they succeeded: 12 months later, the company announced that the buildings were operational—a faster timeline than any we’ve measured at Cleanview.

Soon after that, the first problems began to arise.

During its first winter in operation, Stargate Abilene went offline for days at a time due to issues with power and cooling equipment, according to The Information’s reporting. In March, OpenAI cancelled plans to expand its partnership with Crusoe in Abilene. (Crusoe later signed up Microsoft to take up the capacity).

Crusoe’s “fail and iterate” strategy “has definitely not been cheap,” according to an OpenAI engineer who spoke to The Information.

It’s also not clear that the strategy has achieved its goal of building a gigawatt data center as fast as possible. While Crusoe built the first two buildings of Stargate Abilene in record time, subsequent buildings have fallen behind schedule. The company began construction on the third and fourth buildings in March 2025. They originally planned to finish in March 2026, according to building permits. But in June 2026 the data centers still aren’t online, according to a recent press release from Crusoe.

These delays allowed Anthropic and its partners to build a gigawatt-scale data center before OpenAI. Around the same time that Crusoe began building Stargate Abilene, Amazon began building an 18-building data center in New Carlisle, Indiana for Anthropic. The company finished the first 500 MW of capacity in June 2025, touting its “world’s largest data center” to the New York Times and offering a tour. The data center surpassed 1 GW of power capacity in March 2026, according to Cleanview’s satellite analysis—five times more capacity than Stargate had at that time.

Ultimately grid power, not jet engines, delivered the first gigawatt data center.

In addition to being slower than expected, building power plants has been expensive. A typical “powered shell”—an empty data center building without the expensive chips inside—costs $9-11 billion per gigawatt. Crusoe’s CEO Chase Lochmiller recently told a group of Stanford students that their data centers cost $19.2 billion per gigawatt once you factor in the gas plants—more than two times as much as one of Amazon’s data center partners is planning to spend to build a grid-connected project in Texas.

Crusoe isn’t the only OpenAI partner facing delays at their behind-the-meter data centers. In March 2026, New Mexico’s Land Office blocked a pipeline that would have delivered natural gas to Stargate’s Project Jupiter, the 2.45 GW data center on the border of Mexico. Environmental groups are now trying to convince FERC to slow down the permitting process in order to allow more time for public comment. If successful, the project could be delayed by years.

In New Jersey, neocloud developer Nebius is building a data center for Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s largest cloud provider today. To power the data center, Nebius and its development partner went to Norway to one of the largest cruise ship engine manufacturers in the world and secured 400 MW of engines, in a first of its kind partnership.

In order to build the power plant, Nebius’ development partner needs an air permit though. Efforts to obtain one have been blocked repeatedly. The project is supposed to come online later this year. But if it’s unable to get a “minor” pollution permit, the developer would be forced to request a “major” pollution permit, which would take years—if it were ever issued at all.

Delays at OpenAI’s data centers would be a significant setback, according to the company’s executives. Earlier this year, OpenAI’s CRO, Denise Dresser, wrote a memo to employees amid rising competition from Anthropic. She argued that OpenAI had an advantage over Anthropic because it had so aggressively secured compute. “We saw the exponential compute curve earlier, acted on it faster, and now have a real structural advantage,” she wrote.

But Dresser’s argument assumes that OpenAI will finish its data centers on time and be able to use that compute.

In order for that to happen, the company and its partners will need to build gigawatt-scale power plants based on designs that have never been proven to work at scales larger than a few dozen megawatts. They will need to build gas pipelines, secure air permits, and then when all that’s done, they will need to manage huge fluctuations in power demand at their sites to protect tens of billions of dollars of advanced chips. In other words, they will need to build multiple electric utilities and power grids—a process that took America decades—in the span of two to three years.

OpenAI and its partners could do all this. Most technologists assumed that large-language models and transformers were a dead-end when OpenAI spent huge sums to train GPT 3.5. When their risky bet paid off, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Before Stargate, Crusoe had never built a large-scale data center; it built the first two buildings in record time.

But OpenAI’s bet on behind-the-meter power is a multi-billion dollar gamble that requires many things going right. Should the power plants fail to deliver, the company that saw the future first may find itself watching from behind.

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Get the full behind-the-meter data center report

As I mentioned in the intro, today’s story is based on extensive reporting and research that I did for Cleanview’s recently published behind-the-meter data center report. The 75-page report, which has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, is the most comprehensive analysis on the trend out there. You can read the free executive summary here.

The AI race has officially entered its Mad Max phase.

Over the last month, I reviewed hundreds of documents and satellite images for Cleanview’s latest report on behind-the-meter data centers. Meta’s data center strategy—which you can see from space—was one of the weirder approaches I came across.

Mark Zuckerberg recently ditched the data center designs that Meta had perfected over the last decade and told his team to stick tens of thousands of chips in tents outside their data center in New Albany, Ohio. Each of these chips costs about $60,000. Zuckerberg plans to stick billions of dollars worth of them in the tents.

The strategy has helped cut the time to build compute in half. The first five buildings at Meta’s New Albany, Ohio data center took between two and three years to build. Meta started building five ~125,000 square foot tents between April and June of 2026, according to city permits. Satellite images show the structures have all been built.

To power those “rapid deployment structures”, as they are officially named, Meta signed a 10-year deal with Williams to build a pair of 200 MW off-grid power plants. Those power plants began construction about a year ago and are nearly complete.

Meta is using the same strategy to build a data center in Tennessee, bringing the total count of tent data centers to three.

Strategies like this are part of the reason behind-the-meter data center capacity is growing so quickly. In Cleanview’s report, I found that there’s currently about 2 GW of BTM capacity online today. By the end of the year, it will likely be 3 GW—equivalent to three nuclear power plants. By the end of 2027, it could be as high as 13 GW—more than the power demand of NYC.

I’ve been talking to a lot of reporters about this research. When I told one reporter about these tents and other companies powering their data centers with jet engines, he said, “It’s like a scene out of the movie Mad Max.”

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Read the full report

The full report mentioned above includes analysis of 59 behind-the-meter data center projects and the equipment powering them, detailed case studies of 15 projects with satellite imagery analysis, OEM market share breakdowns, and project timelines. It also includes the full dataset of projects and equipment.

You can read the full report on Cleanview’s website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~75-page paid version with a dataset of all the projects. We also have a discounted option for nonprofits and researchers.

Read the report

What I found was surprising. Rather than wait for a grid connection, some developers were planning to stick gas turbines on the back of semi-trucks and park them outside their data centers. Other developers planned to use repurposed jet engines that once powered Boeing 747 airplanes.

That report received a lot of attention. It was covered by dozens of national media outlets, including The New York Times, Axios, Politico, and NPR. The US Senate asked me to brief them on the trend and subsequently launched a probe into many of the companies I identified in the report.

Today I’m releasing an updated version of the report. My main goal in writing this second version was to answer what I thought was a straightforward question: How many of these behind-the-meter data centers are actually getting built? It turns out that’s not an easy question to answer.

Every week it seems like someone announces a new “world’s largest off-grid data center” project. Last year, it was Fermi America’s Project Matador. Early this year, it was Pacifico Energy’s GW Ranch. More recently, it was TV celebrity Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley.

But the difference between press releases and reality on some of these projects can be significant. Fermi America writes on its website that Project Matador is under construction. But satellite images reveal a different story. There hasn’t been noticeable construction activity on the site for months because Fermi still hasn’t signed a tenant. Without a tenant, it can’t raise the money required to build the project. Without any money, there can be no “world’s largest private power grid.”

Some analysts have argued that Fermi is evidence that the whole behind-the-meter trend is nothing but hype. Others have argued that none of these behemoths are ever going to get built. But this dismissal overlooks the projects that have already been built and the ones that are actively under construction.

In the last 18 months, developers have built four behind-the-meter data centers with a combined capacity of 2 GW—equivalent to two nuclear power plants. The most notable projects are xAI’s Colossus 1 and 2 outside of Memphis. Since 2024, Elon Musk’s company has bought or leased dozens of mobile turbines. Today, these generators have a combined capacity of 1.5 GW—enough to make xAI’s data center the largest in the world.

Satellite images commissioned by Cleanview show nearly 60 turbines onsite across xAI’s two sites. Foundations have been laid for many more.

In Virginia, Vantage Data Centers has operated its own onsite power plant since September 2025. The company was told by the local utility that it couldn’t connect its data center for many years. Rather than wait, Vantage trucked in 8 Solar SMT-130 natural gas turbines.

Vantage’s turbines—which sound like jet engines, according to local residents who live as close as a few hundred feet away—currently operate at all hours of the day. Eventually Vantage plans to connect to the grid, but for now 100% of its power comes from the onsite power plant.

Using satellite images, I identified another 6 projects that are under construction and nearly complete. By the end of 2026, when these projects come online, the amount of behind-the-meter data center capacity will grow to 3 GW.

After 2026, the range of possible outcomes grows significantly. If all projects with signed tenants reach their construction timelines, then another 10 GW could come online in 2027. These projects, which include OpenAI’s massive Stargate data centers, would consume as much electricity as New York City.

It’s unlikely that all of these projects will finish on time. Permitting issues have already delayed behind-the-meter data centers across the country. Earlier this year one of OpenAI’s signature Stargate projects experienced a major setback when the State of New Mexico blocked a planned gas pipeline that would have fueled the project’s 2.45 GW onsite power plant. Satellite analysis suggests the project is likely to miss its target of coming online in 2027.

In New Jersey, Microsoft’s partner Nebius is struggling to obtain an air permit to run a 400 MW onsite gas power plant. The two companies signed a $17.4 billion deal in September 2025. The compute is scheduled to be delivered in 9 tranches, with 7 of them dependent on the onsite gas plant coming online in 2026.

In a scenario where many projects experience delays like this, cumulative behind-the-meter capacity could be as low as 5 GW by the end of 2027—compared to 13 GW if all projects with signed tenants meet their timelines.

Over the next few weeks I plan to publish more takeaways from this report in this newsletter. In the meantime, you can read the full report on Cleanview’s website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~75-page paid version with a dataset of all the projects. We also have a discounted option for nonprofits and researchers.

Read the report

Last October, Fermi America raised $746 million in an IPO to build what it claimed would be the largest data center in the world. The company successfully pitched investors on a massive campus it tentatively called the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus. (The company now generally refers to it as Project Matador.)

Speed and scale were key to Fermi’s pitch. The company told investors it expected to make $1.5 billion in revenue for every 1 GW of capacity built. It said it expected to launch the first one million square feet of space by April 2026 and generate 1 GW of power by the end of 2026. Fermi originally pitched an 11 GW campus; it later increased the targeted capacity to 17 GW.

On its website, the company says that the “initial phase of construction [is] already complete.” But the company has still yet to begin constructing its first buildings, according to Cleanview’s satellite tracker.

Across the country, data center developers are racing to hire construction workers. At the site of OpenAI’s Stargate campus in Abilene 5,000 workers are working through the night to finish the 1.2 GW campus. At Fermi’s site in Amarillo, the workforce has been shrinking, according to local media reports.

In February, The Amarillo Tribune reported rumors of layoffs among construction workers at the site. In response, Fermi’s CEO Toby Neugebauer said that the company was awaiting a ruling on its final Clean Air Permit. “We completed our first phase so fast that we paused construction temporarily,” he said in a statement. A company spokesperson later told KAMR that Fermi still had 100 construction workers on site despite the pause.

Weeks later, on February 25th, Fermi announced that it had secured its air permit and posted a photo to its website with a caption that read, “First phase of construction almost complete.”

Satellite images suggest the company hasn’t begun significant construction activity since then, however.

This is what Fermi’s data center site looked like in August 2025, the month before the company filed its IPO documents.

Two months later, the company went public. That same month, construction workers began clearing land at the site.

By February—the month that Fermi said it had paused construction—this is what the site looked like.

Two months after construction was supposed to resume—and the month that Fermi originally said it would finish its first one million square feet of space—the site looks essentially the same.

Fermi America isn’t the only company attempting to build a mega-campus like this. More than 70 gigawatt-scale data centers have been proposed in the US since the launch of ChatGPT, according to Cleanview’s data center tracker. (1 GW is equivalent to the power demand of an entire city).

Many of these data centers are already under construction, which gives us the ability to compare Fermi’s first 6 months of progress to that of other companies.

Meta announced its 5GW Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana in December 2024 and began clearing land at the site two months later. Here’s what the site looked like 6 months later.

In June 2024, OpenAI’s partner Crusoe began building its 1.2 GW Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas. Within six months, Crusoe finished its first building shell and was putting the roof on the second building. The company launched its first 980,000 square foot phase (200 MW) in September 2025, 15 months after it began construction.

50 miles north of Abilene, Vantage Data Centers is building the second Stargate campus for OpenAI. The 1.2 GW project began construction in September 2025. Here’s what the site looked like 6 months later.

The Rise and Stall of the Largest Data Center in the World

Six months ago, Fermi America raised one of the largest data center IPOs in history.

The company was co-founded by Toby Neugebauer, the son of retired Republican Congressman Randy Neugebauer, whose former district includes the Amarillo area where Project Matador sits. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and Trump’s first Secretary of Energy, is also a co-founder. When Fermi went public in October 2025, Perry’s 2.5% stake was worth roughly $540 million. Neugebauer’s 28% stake was worth approximately $6 billion.

From the start, Fermi has touted its proximity to the White House.

“If the President of the United States wants to move fast [and] wants to have a shovel-ready project in the very near term, Project Matador is his first, second, and third great choice.”

— Toby Neugebauer, Fermi America CEO

The company tentatively named the campus after the president. On its first earnings call, Neugebauer disclosed that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had personally intervened to help the company secure Siemens turbines during trade negotiations with Germany. Neugebauer said Siemens “wanted confirmation that this would make the United States happy” and that Fermi received “a massive push-push by the United States of America” to get the deal done.

In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating AI data centers at DOE facilities as critical defense infrastructure — directly benefiting Fermi’s site adjacent to the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. Neugebauer told investors that “if the President of the United States wants to move fast, wants to have a shovel-ready project in the very near term, that Project Matador is his first, second, and third great choice.”

In November, the company announced it had signed a $150 million funding agreement with an unnamed, investment-grade tenant. Neugebauer told Business Insider that the tenant was Amazon. (After the story published, Fermi issued a statement saying they “categorically deny Business Insider’s claim.”)

Things began to unravel quickly. In Fermi’s first investor presentation in November, the final slide showed that tenant negotiations were behind schedule. When an analyst pressed for details, Neugebauer said they were just three weeks behind and would make up the time. Three weeks later, the exclusivity window on the deal expired. Two days after that, the tenant formally pulled out. The company’s stock immediately plummeted 34%.

In January, a class action lawsuit was filed alleging that Fermi had overstated tenant demand and failed to disclose how dependent the project was on a single tenant’s funding commitment.

In its second earnings call with investors, on March 30th, company executives said they still hadn’t secured a tenant. The CFO said they wouldn’t invest significant capital into construction until they had. He told investors Fermi “could be forced to… surrender collateral to preserve liquidity.” In other words, the company may need to sell some of the Siemens turbines that two cabinet secretaries helped secure.

When a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst asked for more details, Neugebauer jumped in to walk it back. He said giving up turbines was “not our intention whatsoever,” and added that he’d “auction off my two boys first before I would let one of these gensets go.”

On April 17, two and a half weeks after that earnings call, Fermi announced Neugebauer’s immediate departure. Shares fell as much as 31% in post-market trading.

A Year Behind and Counting

Fermi still has a long way to go before it can generate revenue. In order to begin construction and secure project financing, the company needs to find a tenant. Even after that, building a data center at this scale takes time. Crusoe’s first Stargate campus in Abilene took 13 months from the time it began “vertical construction” to going live, with construction running 24 hours a day. That was for an initial 200 MW phase, which is a fraction of the 1,000 MW Fermi is targeting.

If Fermi secured a tenant this month and replicated Crusoe’s speed, it would bring the first buildings online in May 2027—a full year after the initial timeline projected in its IPO filing.

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How we did this analysis

This report is based on Cleanview’s monthly satellite tracker, SEC filings (8-K, 10-K), earnings call transcripts, investor presentations, and news reporting from the Amarillo Tribune and Business Insider.

Cleanview tracks more than 850 planned data centers in the US. For each site, we have satellite imagery dating back to 2022 giving us the ability to track progress over time. We used these satellite images to analyze Fermi’s progress compared to other data center developers.

You can try our new satellite tracking feature for free here:

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In the eyes of Google’s executives, AI is both a once-in-a-generation opportunity and an existential threat to its search monopoly. The company is spending accordingly: Alphabet invested roughly $90 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 and plans to nearly double that to as much as $185 billion in 2026.

Most of that money will flow to data centers—and the infrastructure needed to power them.

Each new data center requires as much electricity as a small city. Permit documents and site plans we obtained show campus designs that use 800–1,000 MW of power. And Google is building dozens of them. Cleanview now tracks 63 Google data center projects across 20 U.S. states. Finding enough electricity to power all of this development has become arguably the company’s most important operational challenge.

Until recently, Google’s power strategy was straightforward. The company worked with utilities to secure grid connections and then contracted with clean energy developers to match its electricity consumption. Google has spent more than a decade building a reputation as a climate leader on the strength of that model. It was the first major tech company to match 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases. It pioneered the concept of 24/7 carbon-free energy. And it has signed more than 22 GW of clean energy power purchase agreements.

But our latest report—and the documents we obtained to produce it—reveal a more complicated story and an evolving power strategy.

In November 2025, Google announced its plans to invest $40 billion in Texas data centers. The company said that investment would fund new data center campuses in Armstrong County and Haskell County. In Armstrong County, Google confirmed to Cleanview that it has partnered with Crusoe Energy to develop a campus known as ‘Goodnight,’ near the town of Claude.

In January 2026, Crusoe filed a permit to build a 933 MW natural gas power plant onsite at the Goodnight campus. Documents obtained by Cleanview show that the gas plant would power two buildings on the campus and would not connect to the power grid. The gas turbines could emit as much as 4.5 million tons of CO2 per year. Cleanview commissioned high-resolution satellite imagery and confirmed the two buildings that would receive power from the gas plant are under construction.

When we reached out for comment, Google confirmed it has partnered with Crusoe to build the Goodnight campus. A Google spokesperson said the company hasn’t signed an offtake agreement with Crusoe for the natural gas plant. Someone familiar with the partnership between the two companies described the negotiations as ongoing and said the amount of power Google would use from the gas plant is still to be determined.

The Goodnight power plant is notable not just for its scale, but for what it lacks. In 2025, Google announced a first-of-its kind agreement to buy power from a 400 MW natural gas plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Illinois. Documents obtained by the Flatwater Free Press suggest Google is exploring a proposed 1,000-3,000 MW gas plant with CCS in Nebraska. (Google told Cleanview they haven’t signed a contract for the project). Unlike these projects, Goodnight’s natural gas plant has no carbon capture technology.

To power its data centers, Google is also investing more in clean energy technology than almost any other entity—public or private—in the world. Since early 2025, the company has signed several gigawatts of new solar and wind PPAs across PJM, ERCOT, SPP, and MISO. It is paying $3 billion to keep aging hydroelectric dams on the grid in Pennsylvania. It is restarting Iowa’s only nuclear plant under a 25-year PPA. And it has signed first-of-their-kind offtake agreements for enhanced geothermal, 100-hour iron-air batteries, advanced nuclear fission, and even fusion energy.

Google is also finding innovative ways to use co-located renewables to connect its data centers in as little as 18 months. In February we published a report on Google’s partnership with AES in Texas, where it will co-locate a 850 MW data center with 600 MW of solar and 945 MW of wind and bypass the crowded ERCOT large-load queue in the process. In this report, we found another example of the strategy that hasn’t been reported on—this time with its soon-to-be subsidiary Intersect Power. Across these projects, Google is bringing nearly 2 GW of data center load online in 2027–2028, powered by co-located wind and solar, without entering the large load queue at all.

Our report shows that Google has pivoted from a grid+renewables strategy to what can be described as an “Everything Everywhere All at Once” strategy when it comes to powering its AI models and compute—one that includes everything from solar and wind to natural gas power.

Get the full report and dataset

The complete ~50-page report includes our analysis of 63 Google data centers across 20 states, detailed case studies, and the company’s evolving power strategy in the AI era. You’ll also get two data files—one covering all 63 data center sites and another with approximately 25 power deals and partnerships we identified.

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We’re releasing a free excerpt focused on one of the report’s most significant findings: The role of natural gas in Google’s data center strategy. You can read the excerpt here.

Microsoft just announced that it will deploy 1.35 GW of Nvidia’s latest chips at an off-grid data center in West Virginia that will run on 100% natural gas. The massive deployment could boost the company’s data center emissions by 40% based on my estimates.

In Cleanview’s latest report, we identified 46 data center developers that were planning to build their own power plants. One of the strangest projects we came across was Monarch Compute Campus, an 8 GW project in West Virginia.

The company behind the project had never built a data center and had no tenant disclosed. Yet we found a 2 GW order for Caterpillar generators to power the first phase. I didn’t know what to make of it.

Yesterday, Nscale—a neocloud backed by Nvidia—announced it has acquired the Monarch project and signed a deal with Microsoft to deploy 1.35 GW of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.

Nscale says it plans to bring the first 2 GW of its project online by 2028. It wants to build 8 GW of capacity by 2031.

Before working on our behind-the-meter data center report, I would have been skeptical of this timeline. But in that research, we learned that developers are getting around grid delays and turbine shortages by purchasing equipment like the Caterpillar gensets Monarch will use.

It’s difficult to overstate the scale of this project. 8 GW is a bit less than the entire peak power demand of New York City.

That scale will come with major environmental impacts. Microsoft’s 1.35 GW deployment could result in 3.9 million tons of CO2 emissions per year by my estimate1. Last year, the company’s entire fleet of data centers emitted about 10 million tons. So this deployment would boost emissions by 40%.2

If the project scales to 8 GW, it could emit 23 million tons per year. That would represent about 35% of the entire coal-heavy state’s emissions.3

In our report, we found 45 more data center projects like this that would add a combined 56 GW of capacity. 90% of those projects were announced last year. With Microsoft getting in on the action, I wouldn’t be surprised if that number continues to climb this year.

Read more about behind-the-meter data centers

To read the full behind-the-meter report that featured the Monarch Compute Campus, you can head to Cleanview’s website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~50-page paid version with two datasets. We also have a discounted option for nonprofits and researchers.

Read the report

Amazon and Meta have said they are building gas plants to power their data centers because it’s the fastest path to power. But this week, Google proved you can do it even faster with co-located renewables. And I found documents showing their strategy.

On Wednesday, Google announced a new data center in Texas that will be powered by renewables built by AES Clean Energy. The press release was light on details, so I used Cleanview’s platform to try to learn more about the project.

In December AES filed a document showing that it plans to connect an 850 MW data center (Google’s) to its massive solar and wind project in West Texas.

The project would use 600 MW of solar and 945 MW of wind power. Using both solar and wind enables near round-the-clock clean energy. And by connecting to the grid, Google gets the reliability it needs when solar and wind output drop.

But the creative part is how this deal enables Google to skip Texas’ large load queue and get online in 18 months instead of 5+ years.

Like the rest of the country, Texas has a massive backlog of data centers trying to connect to its power grid. At the end of 2025, the backlog was 225 GW—equivalent to 20 New York City’s of power demand.

For data center developers like Google that backlog means waiting years to connect to the grid. These delays have led some companies like Meta to start building their own gas power plants as I wrote in Cleanview’s latest report.

But Google found an alternative path—one that relies on a huge amount of onsite renewable energy.

Thanks to a recent rule change, a data center in Texas can piggyback off a power project’s interconnection agreement if its co-located. And that’s what Google appears to be doing here with AES. The documents we found suggest Google is using AES’ grid connection, which took years to secure to get around the ERCOT large load queue.

The wind phase of the project is expected to come online in August 2027. If Google had gone the traditional route, there’s no way they could have achieved that timeline. If they had tried to connect this data center in Virginia, they would have had to wait until the early 2030s.

It’s worth noting that this timeline is similar to the one Amazon and Meta are achieving by using natural gas. They’ve argued that they have to use gas because waiting for renewables delivered through the grid would take too long.

But with this project, Google is proving that it’s possible to build a 850 MW data center in 18 months powered almost entirely by co-located renewables.

Developers and policymakers should take note.

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We wrote more about this project in a brief for Cleanview research subscribers. That brief includes a detailed project timeline, the equipment being used, and the broader policy and market context. Visit our website if you’re interested in becoming a subscriber.

Many data centers claim to use clean energy to power their operations. But in a report Cleanview published today, we found that’s increasingly not true. Instead data centers are using natural gas—and doing so in very strange ways.

It can now take as long as 7 years to connect a data center to the power grid. Beginning about a year ago, developers began pursuing new power strategies. Rather than wait, many data centers are now building their own power plants.

In what we believe is the most comprehensive analysis of this trend to date, we identified 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 GW that plan to build their own power “behind-the-meter.” That represents roughly 30% of all planned data center capacity in the United States, according to Cleanview’s project tracker.

In the last year, this trend has gone from niche to mainstream. 90% of the projects we identified—representing approximately 50 GW—were announced in 2025 alone. A year ago, behind-the-meter data center power was a curiosity, embodied by xAI’s controversial decision to truck mobile generators into Memphis. Now it’s an increasingly common development strategy.

When we began this research, we were skeptical of many of these projects—as all analysts should be. Data center developers often pursue multiple projects with the intention of only building one (the “phantom project” phenomenon). Turbine manufacturers have said lead times for their equipment now stretch as long as 5-7 years. Local opposition to data centers is rising.

But we think much of this capacity is likely to come online soon. Many of the projects we identified are already under construction—in some cases with crews working through the night. Many of those that aren’t under construction have been permitted and have placed equipment orders.

We were able to identify specific equipment deals at approximately two-thirds of the projects we tracked—commitments to manufacturers like GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Siemens, and Doosan that signal serious intent.

What makes our report unique is that we didn’t rely on press releases, which show what developers say they are going to build. Instead we tracked down actual equipment deals and permits showing site plans.

This revealed a very different—and surprising—story. Most of the press releases we found mentioned “all of the above” strategies that include renewables. But ~75% of the generation equipment we could identify (23 GW) was natural gas-powered. Virtually none of the developers planned to build renewables in the short term.

But data centers aren’t planning to use your typical gas turbines—hence why many are able to install them this year or next year. Data center developers are instead turning to:

• Mobile gas generators strapped to semitrucks

• Aeroderivative turbines originally designed for aircraft and warships

• Reciprocating engines that ramp fast, but are less efficient

• Refurbished turbines acquired from industrial operations

In our research, we came across a company that typically sells cruise ship engines that struck a deal to power a data center. One developer, unable to secure enough conventional turbines, placed a $1.25 billion order with Boom Supersonic—a company that has never sold a power generation product. Elon Musk’s xAI famously drove in semitrucks with natural gas generators on the back to build what was at one time the world’s largest data center.

On the surface this makes no sense. These are less efficient technologies and the power will cost far more. But an AI data center can earn as much as $10-12 billion per GW. Getting online a few years early can result in a windfall. Power generation efficiency is out. Speed to power is all that developers care about.

As a company, our main job is to track data centers and power projects. Still, much of this data shocked us. The public narrative is that data centers are waiting for grid connections and 5-7 year turbine backlogs. But that narrative is lagging what is actually happening on the ground in rural counties across the country.

To read the full report, you can head to our website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~50-page paid version with two datasets. We also have a discounted option for nonprofits and researchers.

Read the report

Today, Cleanview is closed for new business in solidarity with those protesting the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota. Recently, federal agents and officials have:

• Killed two US citizens exercising their First Amendment rights—Renée Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse—and then called them terrorists.

• Broken into the homes of US citizens without judicial warrants, breaching the Fourth Amendment, and held them without due process.

• Questioned Americans' right to legally carry firearms—a Second Amendment right—which the NRA has called "dangerous and wrong."

All of these actions are a threat to freedom and democracy in America. That’s why we’re joining Americans from all sides of the political spectrum in condemning these actions.

We’ll open up our “digital doors” for business tomorrow.

If you would like to join me in protesting these actions, you are more than welcome to copy and paste (and edit) my statement and share it with your customers or community.

As I wrote earlier this week, when most Americans learn about what's happening in Minneapolis, they don’t approve of it. They see the cruelty and abuses of power for what they are.

But many people aren't hearing about these injustices. That's why I'm choosing to use our platform as a company and my voice as an individual to speak up.

Every American should know what’s happening right now.

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This is a very new trend. A little more than a year ago, virtually all data center developers planned to use the electric grid to power 100% of their projects. There were a lot of advantages to this—mainly the fact that you didn’t need to go into the power plant business if you wanted to stick some computer chips in a warehouse. You could just pay a utility a couple cents per kilowatt hour to run your operation.

In December 2024, there was less than 2 GW of planned behind-the-meter data center capacity, according to our data center tracker at Cleanview. By the end of 2025, developers had announced roughly 40 projects that planned to skip the grid partially or entirely with a combined 48 GW of capacity.

All of these projects are motivated by the same goal: getting their data center online as soon as possible.

It can take as long as 7 years to connect a hyperscale data center to the grid in a place like Virginia now. Building your own behind-the-meter power plant in a red state with lax regulations can get that time down to less than 2 years.

Some of these projects will soon be home to America's largest fossil fuel power plants, like Homer City Energy Campus in PA—a proposed 4.5 GW natural gas plant that will send all of its power to an onsite data center. The project has already been permitted and secured its gas turbines. It expects to start delivering power by 2027.

Other projects will use a combination of technologies—everything from solar, wind, batteries, and even nuclear. Natural gas is by far the most common, though. 72% of projects plan to use it.

But speed comes with a cost. Homer City's 4.5 GW project could soon become one of the largest single sources of carbon emissions in the country, emitting millions of tons of CO2 each year.

At Cleanview we're tracking more than 30 projects that plan to use onsite gas with a combined 48 GW of capacity. Virtually all of those projects were announced in just the last 12 months.

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Other trends and stories I’m following

On the potential for an AI power glut

Earlier this month, Tracy Alloway of the excellent Odd Lots podcast wrote in her newsletter:

In a new report, CreditSights analysts led by Andy DeVries crunch the numbers to show that US utilities already appear to be in the process of building twice as much power capacity as is currently forecast to be needed by 2030. In other words, the data center buildout already looks to be outstripping demand for compute.

On the demand side: Using third-party estimates for future power demand from data centers (including estimates from BloombergNEF), the analysts come up with 94 gigawatts (GW) needed by 2030 and 138 GW by 2035. Subtracting the power that’s already in use today, leaves you with demand that’s expected to grow by a net 59 GW and 103 GW, respectively.

On the supply side: The analysts compile data center grid connection requests as reported by the actual companies doing the hookups, which are the utilities. Utilities generally report both firm commitments and more speculative pipeline projects, but CreditSights is only using actual committed projects here (which would make, if anything, the estimate of supply quite conservative). These connection requests are adjusted by a Power Usage Effectiveness factor to try to isolate the compute portion from other power needs like cooling, lighting etc. Put it altogether and you get 112 GW of firm supply capacity already lined up (even without counting that much larger supply of projects that might be in the pipeline).

It’s worth noting that the supply figures here are in addition to the “behind-the-meter” projects I wrote about above.

As I’ve written often on this newsletter, forecasting is difficult. There’s huge uncertainty around the demand for AI, its future efficiency, and the ability of any of these sluggish utilities to actually build these power plants. But history definitely suggests that some degree of overbuilding is a likely outcome. How much exactly is the trillion dollar question.

Mark Carney’s speech heard around the world

In his Davos speech last week, Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney did what few other powerful people have done in the last year: He stood up to Donald Trump and challenged his power. The full speech is worth watching due to its significance. But I’ll also say it was just a well-written, almost poetic, speech.

Carney’s speech, and this excerpt in particular, actually inspired me to write my post about the killings and injustices in Minneapolis:

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this “living within a lie”.

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

Trump’s gift to China

Trump’s chaotic and aggressive trade policy was initially seen as a threat to Chinese manufacturing and exports. But now, it appears that it could have been a great gift as US allies strike deals with the country.

Earlier this month, Canada’s government announced a trade deal with China to import its cheap electric vehicles. Per the BBC:

The deal will see Canada ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles that it imposed in tandem with the US in 2024. In exchange, China will lower retaliatory tariffs on key Canadian agricultural products.

With the lower EV tariffs, approximately 10% of Canada’s electric vehicle sales are now expected to go to Chinese automakers, said Vivek Astvansh, a business professor at McGill University in Montreal.

Canada isn’t the only country cutting deals with China or absorbing it’s overcapacity. China’s trade surplus rose in 2025, even as exports to the US fell. As the New York Times reports:

China’s surplus, the value of goods and services it sold abroad versus its imports, reached $1.19 trillion, an increase of 20 percent from 2024… For December alone, China’s surplus reached $114.14 billion, propelled by surging exports to the European Union, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

A few shows that have brought me joy recently

Over the last few years, I’ve come to love Cleo Abram’s YouTube series: Huge If True. Cleo’s optimism and curiosity are infectious. The visuals are beautiful. And the topics are often about scientific breakthroughs or research I had never heard of.

More recently—as in within just the last few days as I’ve been sick with the flu—I stumbled upon the YouTube show Track Star, which had a moment in 2025. On the show, host Jack Coyne gives famous musicians a pair of headphones, plays a song, and asks them to name the artist.

As the New Yorker’s David Remnick said in an interview, “It’s a sophisticated trick.” Coyne does a lot of research before every episode so he often plays songs of significance to the interviewee. “He’s making you tell a little bit about yourself and your life and your obsessions and your pleasures, maybe your heartbreaks. It is, in this ugly world, a relief and a pleasure to see people talking about what makes them feel something very deeply.”

This show with Jon Batiste brought me a lot of joy:

This weekend, federal agents killed Alex Pretti, a nurse who was filming their activities. The Trump administration defended their actions saying that the man was a domestic terrorist who was attacking ICE agents.

This is an insult to every American’s intelligence. The killing was filmed by two witnesses and both videos show that Pretti had one hand up and another on his camera when he was taken to the ground. Federal agents then fired 10 shots into him.

Pretti had a handgun on him at the time he was killed, which the administration is using as evidence that he was a terrorist. But the right to bear arms is a constitutional right. Republicans frequently made this point in 2020 when Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to a protest in Wisconsin with a AR-15 and shot two people.

The killings of Pretti and Renee Good earlier this month aren’t the only injustices that have taken place in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration has detained US citizens, thrown children in jails apart from their parents, and entered homes without warrants. When peaceful protesters have filmed these activities, federal agents have threatened to put them on lists and hurt them.

Earlier this month ICE agents broke down the door of a US citizen, put a gun to his head, and dragged him out in the cold in his underwear—all without a warrant.

Since July, ICE agents have held more than 2,300 people across the US without due process, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

Peacefully protesting is a 1st amendment right; bearing arms, which I wish was less common, is a 2nd amendment right; and requiring a warrant to enter a home is a 4th amendment right.

The Trump administration is challenging all of these constitutional rights. And they are lying to the American people about it, claiming that peaceful protesters are terrorists.

None of this is about the issue of immigration. Democrats and Republicans can disagree on border enforcement or deportation policy. That’s a sign of a healthy democracy. But what’s happening in Minneapolis is something else entirely: it’s the stuff of a Founding Father’s nightmare.

Most Americans don’t approve of what’s happening in Minneapolis either. Since the federal government sent thousands of agents to the city to sow chaos, Trump’s poll numbers on the issue of immigration have fallen significantly.

When people see the videos—when they watch what actually happened to Alex Pretti and Renee Good—they recognize that something has gone deeply wrong. That’s why I think it’s important for all of us to talk about what’s happening and simply describe what we’re seeing with our eyes.

Every American should know what’s happening right now.

But there was one notable exception: In California, carbon emissions fell by 8%.

The decarbonization of California’s power grid has been driven by huge growth in solar and battery capacity in recent years. The state has added more than 300 large-scale solar projects and more than 200 large-scale battery projects in the last 5 years, according to Cleanview’s project tracker. Small-scale solar and battery adoption has also been significant.

The growth of solar and batteries is now cutting into the state’s fossil fuel power plant generation. Since 2023, natural gas generation has fallen by 10%.

Much of this fossil fuel displacement is happening in the afternoon and evening hours when electricity demand is highest. Batteries that charge up on abundant solar power during the day now discharge during these evening peaks when natural gas peaker plants would otherwise fire up.

The state still has a long way to go in its efforts to reach 100% clean power, but the trends are going in the right direction. That wasn’t true as recently as just a few years ago. The state’s electricity emissions were stubbornly flat for much of the last decade.

The growth of solar and batteries wasn’t the only factor behind California’s decline in emissions last year though. Falling electricity demand also helped. Homes and businesses consumed 2.4% less electricity in 2025 than they did the year before.

Here the state was an outlier, too. On every other major US electric grid—in Texas, in the Midwest, in the Northeast—electricity demand rose. In Arizona, it rose by a staggering 8%. That demand growth, which was driven in many places by data centers, meant that coal and gas plants had to run more frequently.

In California there’s been very little growth in data centers or other industrial sources of electricity demand. The state’s high electricity prices and slow permitting process have made it unattractive to hyperscale data center developers. (Slow permitting has also plagued renewable projects for decades, slowing the energy transition).

Here’s a map showing all the planned data centers in the US from our project tracker at Cleanview. Note how few are in California relative to places like Texas, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic.

California’s real test will come when its electricity demand begins to rise again—which is likely in the near future.

The state has ambitious plans to electrify its transportation and buildings, putting millions of electric vehicles on the road and heat pumps in homes. That electrification will be essential to cutting emissions economy-wide, but it will also mean more demand on the grid.

Once demand starts climbing again, California will face the same challenge every other US grid struggled with last year. To decarbonize in that environment will require deploying clean energy even faster.

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At all hours of the night, in windowless buildings scattered across Phoenix’s sprawl, machines that never sleep now hum away, drawing power around the clock. Hundreds of miles of yellow fiber optic cables connect thousands of cabinets filled with these machines—each one serving up a video, ChatGPT query, or newsletter like this.

Few places in the world are seeing more demand from data centers than Phoenix. In the last few years, developers and tech companies have built more than a dozen large-scale data centers. The combined capacity of operating data centers in Arizona is now more than 2,000 MW, according to Cleanview’s data center tracker.

But that’s nothing compared to the growth that is likely to come over the next decade.

Arizona's three major utilities are grappling with data center interconnection requests that would dwarf their existing grids. Arizona Public Service (APS)—which currently peaks around 8,200 MW—has 30,000 MW of data center requests sitting in their queue.

"We've never sat in a position before where somebody's asking you to triple the size of your company," Jacob Tetlow, APS's Executive Vice President, recently told KTAR News. APS's average data center request now stands at 500 megawatts—enough to power roughly 375,000 homes.

Already data centers are causing electricity demand to rise faster in Arizona than almost any other place in the country. In 2025, electricity demand in Arizona grew by 8%—a growth rate 4x larger than that of the United States as a whole.

Utilities have received so many requests from data center developers that they’ve had to start turning some away for fear of breaking the grid.

“The utility cannot commit to serving them because it would put existing customers at risk of having poor reliability,” Jose Esparza, APS Senior Vice President of Public Policy, told a NARUC conference in November 2024.

Utilities have found a way to accommodate many of the requests, however. Nighttime electricity demand—a good proxy for data center demand in Arizona—grew by 45% between 2019 and 2025.

Data centers’ round-the-clock demand for power has made decarbonization in Arizona more difficult.

In the last decade, solar power generation has grown by more than 400% in the state. The state has added 4,748 MW of battery storage capacity—equivalent to the peak output of 5 nuclear power plants. That’s helped the state cut its emissions significantly since 2010.

But solar and short-duration batteries provide hardly any power to these machines when it’s 3am. That’s one reason why, after falling for more than a decade, Arizona’s electricity emissions have risen by 3% since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

The data center surge has driven Arizona utilities to walk back decarbonization commitments. In August 2025, APS abandoned its 2050 "100% clean energy" commitment, replacing it with an aspirational "carbon neutral" goal that allows offsets. The company also eliminated interim targets and extended operations at the Four Corners coal plant to 2038.

Utilities are also planning large investments in natural gas power plants. When it announced that it would renege on its climate targets, APS announced a new planned 2,000 MW gas plant.

“Additional natural gas generation is essential to support our existing customers and to begin addressing unprecedented requests from extra-large energy users, such as data centers,” Tetlow, the company’s CEO, said.

Data center water use has emerged as another flashpoint in Arizona’s arid landscape. “This has been the driest 12 months in 126 years. We are on red alert, and I think data centers are an irresponsible use of our water,” Mesa Vice Mayor Jenn Duff told NBC News.

Some tech giants are responding by eliminating water cooling. Joe Kava, Google’s VP of Global Data Centers, announced the company’s Mesa facility would use no water for cooling. Microsoft has said its data centers “will use zero water for cooling for more than half the year, leveraging a method called adiabatic cooling.”

This will put less pressure on scarce water resources, but it will push electricity demand up even higher. Companies use water cooling more in order to use electric cooling systems less. Take away the water cooling systems and each data center will use more electricity. In a place like Arizona that might be the right choice, but it’s a tradeoff nonetheless.

Some communities have chosen to block data centers altogether.

In December 2025, Chandler’s City Council voted 7-0 to reject a $2.5 billion AI data center despite lobbying from former Senator Kyrsten Sinema. A few months earlier, Tucson’s City Council unanimously halted Project Blue, a proposed $3.6 billion, 600 MW Amazon-linked data center that would have consumed 15% of Tucson Electric Power’s current generation capacity.

“In addition to the water use, this was a problem because of the energy use,” Councilmember Kevin Dahl said.

Tech companies and data center developers continue to push ahead, despite the opposition. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all expanding their data center operations in Phoenix.

A proposed 1.5 gigawatt Hassayampa Ranch development backed by investor Chamath Palihapitiya received zoning approval in December 2025. The developer of the project told Fortune, “We have probably six to eight large hyperscalers that are interested in looking at it.”

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