“Grid growth can’t match AI demand, so a pragmatic ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy is essential—with gas as a critical bridge,” Cully Cavness, the cofounder and president of Crusoe, told WIRED in a statement. “This isn’t the destination; it’s the foundation we build on while investing in batteries, solar, wind, and small modular nuclear reactors. We’re not waiting for a carbon-free grid—we’re building the path to one.”
Other tech companies are publicly embracing new gas build-outs. This week, Microsoft signed a deal with oil giant Chevron to supply up to 2.5 gigawatts of gas power for a data center in West Texas.
For his part, Thomas sees behind-the-meter power potentially becoming the main power strategy for data center developers.
“It’s important to note how novel this is,” he says. “This is not something that any business was doing up until a year ago or so, and now it is so popular. The speed is so much better than waiting for the grid.”
Since the start of the AI arms race, Big Tech companies that previously shared aggressive climate goals have admitted to backtracking, as they increasingly build out power-hungry data centers. Despite a nearly 50 percent increase in overall emissions over the past five years Google claimed in its sustainability report last year that it had reduced its data center emissions by 12 percent. And the company has publicly touted its commitment to renewable power. In addition to the Armstrong campus, Google’s Texas investment includes a data center in Haskell county that will, per a company press release, “be built alongside a new solar and battery storage plant.” Google is also building out a number of large behind-the-meter renewable energy projects, as Thomas explored in a recent report.
With an administration in charge that both champions data center buildouts, scorns greenhouse gas reporting policies, and pushes American natural gas, it seems likely that behind-the-meter gas power will develop in spite of the big emissions cost. In March, the White House convened executives from seven big tech companies, including Google, to sign a nonbinding agreement to protect ratepayers, including a pledge to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands.” Experts told WIRED that this agreement was mostly symbolic, as neither data center developers nor the White House have much control over policies that would lower electric bills.
Some lawmakers, however, are questioning Big Tech about the climate impacts of their data center projects. Just a few days after the White House event, three Democratic senators sent letters to a number of AI companies and data center developers, including xAI, OpenAI, and Meta, expressing concern about specific large-scale data center projects and their potential impact on the environment and the climate. (The lawmakers did not send a letter to Google, but did send a letter to Crusoe asking about an unrelated project.) The senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, asked that executives from these companies answer several questions about their planned data centers, including why they decided to power the data centers with natural gas as opposed to renewables.
“It’s well established that climate upheaval and huge economic impacts will result if we fail to
limit global temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,” the senators wrote in their letter to tech executives, laying out the need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet this goal. “I would ask that you explain how your actions are consistent with this goal, and if they are not, why you don’t think that matters.”