Two thousand acres near Pecos, Texas. Eight thousand more thirty miles away. Between them, enough new natural-gas generation to match the peak electricity draw of New York City — and none of it will ever touch the public grid.
That is the arithmetic behind Chevron's Project Kilby, built to feed a Microsoft data center, and Amazon's West Texas campus a short drive off. About 30 miles away, Chevron is building a gas plant for Microsoft on a 2,000-acre site, and combined, the two projects can supply over 10 gigawatts, comparable to New York City's peak power demand. Neither waited for a utility's permission, because in today's AI buildout, permission is the scarcest resource of all.
That scarcity is now a climate problem with a number attached. A Bloomberg News analysis found ninety-nine proposed plants tracked by BloombergNEF would emit about 318 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually if run at industry-standard rates. Set against the country's existing footprint, the entire US electric power industry emitted about 1,485 million metric tons of carbon last year, meaning one slice of data center infrastructure has the potential to lift US power sector emissions by 20%, and as much as a third should the new plants run flat out. That is not a rounding error. It is a new industrial sector's exhaust, bolted onto a grid that was supposed to be getting cleaner.
The workaround becomes the plan
The logic is simple and, for developers, unavoidable. With even greenlit facilities facing yearslong delays connecting to regulated electricity grids, data center developers are seeking alternatives, including so-called behind-the-meter projects that can be permitted and built without the approval of utilities or the independent system operators charged with ensuring grid reliability. Skip the interconnection queue, skip the wait, and skip — crucially — the public scrutiny that comes with asking a grid operator for a slice of shared capacity.
David Pomerantz, who runs the utility watchdog Energy and Policy Institute, put it bluntly: "There is immense, immense pressure on the whole sector to get power, and get it fast," he told Bloomberg, adding that developers are "sort of agnostic if it is clean or dirty." The count so far: 99 gas projects planned in 22 states, more than a third of them in Texas — a rush that has already reshaped state policy, since Texas paused new data center approvals amid the surge in demand. Combined, Amazon's Pecos County site and Chevron's Microsoft plant alone could produce combined annual emissions of about 45 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent — just under half of Washington state's yearly total.
It is worth noting what these plants are not: relics of a fossil-fuel holdout. The BNEF data includes projects backed by the leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, upstart data center operators that fashion themselves as AI specialists, as well as cloud-computing giants and investor groups seeking tenants. Amazon and Microsoft both maintain their corporate climate pledges remain intact even as they underwrite new gas turbines, and Amazon says it is separately weighing solar and batteries for its Texas footprint — additions, not replacements, for the gas already under construction.
Denmark takes the opposite bet
If American developers are engineering their way past the queue, Denmark just made the queue itself the instrument of policy. Bloomberg reported this week that the country has published an emergency grid law that puts data centers last in line for scarce capacity — the culmination of a fight that began in March, when grid operator Energinet froze new connection agreements after requests ballooned far beyond what the network could carry. The bill that followed sorts consumers into tiers: "ordinary" households, hospitals and companies would get priority, while behind the rhetoric, the draft bill would give lowest priority to any datacentre but those serving worthy societal functions such as health, defence or emergency services. A cross-party agreement backed by 80% of parliament promised to push the datacentres of US tech giants to the back of the queue for scarce grid capacity.
The two approaches are mirror images of the same shortage. Denmark decided that if the grid cannot supply everyone, hyperscalers should wait. Texas decided that if the grid cannot supply everyone, hyperscalers should stop asking — and build their own smokestacks instead. Neither solves the underlying problem, which is that AI's appetite for electricity is growing faster than anyone's ability to generate it cleanly and deliver it fairly. One country is rationing patience. The other is burning gas to avoid needing any.
