Nobody voted for 189 gigawatts of gas
The pile of gas-fired power plants being planned in the US purely to run data centres has nearly doubled in under a year. If all of it gets built, it is enough electricity for roughly 189 million homes — and none of those homes are the customer.
Two years ago this was a rounding error. In early 2024, Global Energy Monitor — a research group that keeps count of power plants around the world — could find only 4 gigawatts of gas plants in development specifically to feed data centres in the US. By the end of 2025 the count was 97 gigawatts. In research released on Tuesday, the group put the figure at more than 189 gigawatts as of mid-2026.
One gigawatt, as the report notes, runs about a million homes. So picture every house in a country the size of the US getting a second, invisible neighbour that never sleeps, never goes on holiday, and never turns the lights off. That is the shape of the plan on paper.
Планы газовых электростанций под дата-центры в США за полгода выросли с 97 до 189 гигаватт — это мощность, сопоставимая с электроснабжением почти 200 млн домов, и она закрепляет выбросы и счета за электричество на десятилетия вперёд.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections