Source: WIRED Science
OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI are planning natural gas-powered data centers that would generate 129 million metric tons of carbon annually—exceeding the emissions of most countries and contradicting the climate math that justified AI's infrastructure buildout. Permit data shows a collision between the industry's technical demands (continuous power for training runs) and the claim that AI scaling is compatible with net-zero commitments. The problem is structural: these companies must either deploy renewables at previously unseen scale, accept grid-destabilizing load profiles, or publicly revise their climate pledges.