The gas plants planned to power several major AI data centres could produce emissions on a vast scale, according to an analysis by Harvard researcher Gianluca Guidi. The projects could also leave a long-lived carbon footprint after today’s AI hardware has had its day.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health describes Guidi’s analysis of proposed data-centre and gas-power projects, drawing on air permits, company disclosures and other materials. It reports that two Amazon projects in Texas and Pennsylvania could produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest coal plant in the US, equivalent to a 28.5% increase over Amazon’s current greenhouse-gas footprint.
The analysis also estimates that gas plants serving a Meta data centre in Louisiana could emit more carbon than Meta’s current total emissions. A Microsoft project in West Texas and a Google project in Wyoming would together use five times as much electricity as every household in Wyoming. A planned OpenAI data centre in Ohio could emit more carbon pollution than those Microsoft and Google projects combined.
Why it matters
These are estimates about planned projects, not measurements of emissions from operating data centres. But the scale described makes the infrastructure behind AI harder to treat as an abstract footnote: power plants, transmission, land, water and fuel are part of the bargain.
Guidi warns that gas plants could keep running for at least a generation, even if the AI boom fades. That makes the choices made to meet today’s computing demand potentially consequential well beyond the current hardware cycle.
Our read
The striking part is not just how much power these projects may need, but how long the resulting infrastructure could last. If the forecasts hold, the carbon consequences could outlive the AI products and chips that helped justify the build-out. The useful debate is about what gets built, what it emits and who is accountable for those estimates, not whether AI feels digital.
What to watch
- Whether the proposed gas plants and data centres proceed as planned.
- How the projects’ estimated emissions compare with actual emissions once they operate.
- Whether developers disclose updated power-demand and emissions figures as projects progress.
Discussion spark: If AI data centres are expected to run on gas infrastructure for decades, should developers have to prove the climate case before building, or should meeting computing demand take priority?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (5 November 2026, 15:36 UTC)
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