Global Energy Monitor: over 97 GW of gas-fired power in the US pipeline were explicitly earmarked for data centers in 2025, compared with just 4 GW in 2024
Gas projects in the US pipeline explicitly linked to data centers increased by almost 25 times over the past two years, according to new research from Global Energy Monitor.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reported pipeline surge follows warnings that data centers could drive nearly half of US electricity-demand growth, with global data-center consumption projected to rise sharply by 2030 in an earlier electricity-demand outlook. It makes power availability—not just servers or real estate—a central constraint on data-center expansion.
The pipeline figure also provides context for later permitting scrutiny: documents tied to 11 campuses indicated substantial potential annual emissions from associated gas projects in the subsequent air-permit reporting.
First-order effects
- Developers and utilities pursuing US data-center campuses now have a much larger identified set of gas-fired projects to advance through siting, permitting and interconnection processes.
- Data-center capacity plans become more directly coupled to fuel supply, generation construction and power-delivery timelines rather than relying solely on existing grid capacity.
Second-order effects
- The volume of proposed gas capacity raises the stakes for power-market and grid planners deciding which projects receive interconnection and transmission attention, alongside other sources of new load.
- Environmental permitting and emissions scrutiny are likely to become more consequential for campus-linked generation, given the scale indicated by later permit-based emissions estimates.
Third-order effects
- If these proposals progress, US AI and cloud build-outs may increasingly be organized around dedicated, firm power procurement—a shift toward treating compute infrastructure as utility infrastructure.
- The gap between proposed capacity and completed projects will become a key execution risk: pipeline totals signal demand intent, but do not by themselves establish operating generation or delivered power.
The trend: AI-era data-center growth is turning access to dependable power into a primary determinant of where and how quickly compute capacity can be built.