The defining statistic of AI's energy footprint arrived this week from the International Energy Agency: in 2026, the United States is on track to invest more in fossil-fuelled power than China. As Carbon Brief reported, that reversal is driven almost entirely by one thing, the data-centre boom, and the rush to build gas-fired plants fast enough to feed it. US gas-power investment tripled in 2025, and the agency expects the surge to roll on through this year.
The reason gas is winning is unglamorous: speed. A new data centre needs power within about three years, and gas plants can be built on that timeline. Nuclear reactors typically take a decade; wind and solar need two to three times as much land and years of transmission approvals. So tech companies are increasingly building "captive" gas plants on site to skip the grid-connection queue altogether. Since the start of 2025, the IEA says, those captive US data centres have committed more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world other than the United States itself. Global orders for gas-power plants reached 130 gigawatts last year, a 25-year high.
This collides directly with the climate pledges those same companies have made. The IEA found that worldwide spending on grids, equipment and generation to support data centres hit $105 billion in 2025, more than the entire energy sector across Africa, a continent where over 600 million people still lack electricity. In the US, the Trump administration's phase-out of renewable tax credits has pushed the agency to revise its wind and solar forecasts downward, even as data centres are set to account for half of all electricity-demand growth through 2030.
The boom is also redrawing the country's energy map, and the split is hardening into a political fault line. Writing for the climate-sceptic outlet Watts Up With That, Steve Goreham argues that states with gas-friendly policies are capturing the data-centre rush while those with net-zero mandates are being passed over. He cites lopsided growth figures: data-centre construction up 81 percent in Texas and more than 150 percent in Georgia since mid-2024, against single digits in California and New York and zero new centres in Massachusetts. His prescription, that green states should scrap their clean-energy mandates, is advocacy rather than analysis, but the underlying pattern, capital flowing to wherever power is cheapest and quickest to build, is hard to dispute.
There is a counter-current on the supply side. TSMC's Kevin Zhang told Reuters that AI's power appetite has made energy efficiency a central design goal, and the company expects its chips to cut power use by up to 30 percent between today's process and its 2028 generation while raising performance by more than a fifth. The IEA, for its part, notes that the tech sector, now behind roughly 40 percent of all corporate power-purchase agreements, is also bankrolling emerging clean technologies such as small modular reactors and advanced geothermal.
That is the genuine tension buried in the numbers. AI is, at once, the largest new force pulling investment back toward fossil fuels and one of the biggest underwriters of the clean technologies meant to replace them. The difference is timing. Gas is what gets built this year, because it can be; nuclear and geothermal are bets on the next decade. Whether the second half of that trade ever arrives, or whether the gas plants simply stay on once they are running, is the question the AI build-out has quietly placed at the centre of the energy transition.