A version of this story was published in the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter on August 26, 2026. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus expert analysis, original reporting, and curated resources — in your inbox every Wednesday.
The U.S.’ resurgent passion for building new gas infrastructure is quickly putting the U.S. at risk of reversing any emissions cuts we’ve achieved so far — and it’s mostly down to data centers.
Consider the news that came out just last week. The mammoth data center being developed by SB Energy in Pike County, Ohio, boasting eight gigawatts of IT capacity, has a tenant: OpenAI. The facility will be supported by 10 GW of new energy capacity, 9.2 GW of which will be gas generation, according to the project’s website.
This would make it one of the largest, if not the largest, gas power plants in the U.S. Amazon and Pacifico Energy’s planned 7.65-GW off-grid facility in Pecos County, Texas, comes in second.
The U.S. government is not just eagerly endorsing the Ohio project, but also actively involved. SB Energy is working in partnership with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which is giving it access to federal land for the development. Meanwhile, the new gas generation is funded in part through the U.S.-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement. The federal government, in fact, will own the resulting generation assets.
Just a few days later, a group of electric cooperatives executives called for the repeal of the gas power plant emissions rules finalized by the EPA in 2024. The group, which includes CEOs from the National Rural Electric Cooperative, Oglethorpe Power Corp, and Basin Electric Power Cooperative, says the rules are hampering the co-ops’ ability to meet the surge of electricity demand from data centers.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Global Energy Monitor this week found that in the first half of 2026, the U.S. has nearly doubled the gas capacity it’s developing for data centers to around 189 GW “ across the announced, pre-construction, and construction phases,” according to data released yesterday. That’s almost 100 GW more than GEM had tracked at the end of 2025 — and all of it tied to data centers.
Overall U.S. gas power capacity development, meanwhile, has increased 50%, from 252 GW to 378 GW. That means “the U.S. is now building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China and has nearly three times its gas-fired power capacity in development.”
The country has been building to this point for months. Latitude Media CEO Scott Clavenna wrote about “the collective sense that fossil gas is back” for this newsletter almost exactly a year ago, pointing out at the time that whether AI would be a win for gas depended on factors including its cost. He wrote that “ideally the complex mix of market forces at work today will keep [fossil gas] impacts minimized while the energy transition continues.” A year later, the data suggests that Scott’s hope will be dashed.
That said, the extent of the country’s gas buildout is uncertain. GEM itself notes that globally “nearly one-quarter of [gas] projects earmarked for data centers do not have a named start year, and that “turbine supply constraints, financing uncertainty, local data center moratoriums, and mounting public opposition leave the true scale of the gas power buildout uncertain.”
GEM project manager Jenny Martos was quoted in the press release as saying that “it is nearly impossible nowadays to guess what is a pie in the sky proposal, and what has a real chance of getting built.”
Pike County’s 9.2-GW project in particular is built on some things that could undermine its success, or at very least its ease of development.
For one, the federal government’s role is ostensibly an advantage for the developer, given that the Trump administration aims to complete the environmental review in only seven months. But as my colleague Nick Zenkin pointed out on the site last month, speedy reviews can be a double-edged sword if a less gas-friendly administration takes over.
Second, the financing and ownership structure behind the project is complicated. SB Energy will build, own, and operate the data center part of the project, which will then be leased by OpenAI once it’s done. SB Energy will also operate the gas power plant, thanks in part to the $33.3 billion in Japanese funding — but as mentioned above, the plant will belong to the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Nvidia will provide the AI compute infrastructure for the data center.
But OpenAI and Nvidia are also both backers of SB Energy, which is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group. OpenAI invested $500 million in the company in January 2026, while Nvidia announced a $1.5-billion investment in the company earlier this month, as part of its growing collection of energy stakes that I enumerated this week. That’s in addition to Nvidia’s guarantee of up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease the data center.
This entanglement of ownership and financing — where everyone is everyone’s customer — is becoming common for some of the biggest projects in the AI boom. The growing trend isn’t reassuring, especially when the deals are tied to a project that’s supposed to be owned by the government, and therefore implicates its citizens.
What happens to the whole structure if just one thread of the chain snaps, and the development is never completed? Or, what happens to the massive gas plant with a decades-long operating life if the demand it’s built to serve disappears, and OpenAI’s growth doesn’t outrun the bill?
