AI's New Power Plants Are Being Built Off the Grid

Six new gas-fired power plants are under construction across the United States, and not one of them will show up on a residential electric bill. Williams Companies, one of the largest U.S. oil-and-gas infrastructure companies, is siting four of them in Ohio for Meta, and Chevron has signed a 20-year power agreement to run roughly 2.67 gigawatts in West Texas for Microsoft. Permits for five of the seven named projects, according to a Wired analysis of state filings, project roughly 21 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per year, a footprint on par with Guatemala's annual output.

The trick is the meter. These plants are being built on the data center's side of the electric meter, what the industry calls "behind-the-meter." They connect directly to the data center, not to the public grid. That lets them skip the multi-year interconnection queues that grid-tied projects face, and, because no retail customers are on the line, they fall outside the public-utility commissions that would otherwise scrutinize the cost and the climate math. Williams and Chevron are selling power to a single buyer, on a private contract, at a price the public never sees.

Williams' investor materials and a separate 8-K filing show the company has committed $5.34 billion to a Power Innovation joint venture with Blackstone, plus another $3.1 billion for two more gas-fired projects. Chevron's own newsroom announced the West Texas deal this quarter, on top of a 2025 framework it had already signed with Engine No. 1 and GE Vernova to sell power-solutions infrastructure to U.S. data centers.

For executives, this is a win. Williams CEO Alan Armstrong called the joint venture a chance to "monetize" the company's pipeline footprint at a moment when AI demand is pulling gas producers in the opposite direction from the energy transition. Chevron framed its Microsoft deal as a long-dated, predictable revenue stream. Both pitches are aimed at investors, and both are accurate. They are also the reason the build is hard to slow: the customer is concentrated, the contract is long, and the regulator isn't in the room.

BloombergNEF, cited in the Wired analysis, projects U.S. natural-gas production will have to rise roughly 36% by the mid-2030s to keep up with demand that is now substantially driven by data centers. Every new gigawatt of AI capacity pulls more gas upstream, more pipelines midstream, and more combustion downstream. The Ohio and West Texas permits are the visible tip of that curve.

A Texas Comptroller filing documents a school-district tax abatement tied to one of the data-center projects, the same kind of local incentive that has historically welcomed data centers on the grid side. The behind-the-meter model just moves the subsidy upstream, to the gas plant and the pipeline, while keeping the public out of the rate-case room.

Friends of the Earth, quoted in the Wired analysis, called the tech-oil alliance a "lifeline to an industry we need to be phasing out." The point is not that Microsoft or Meta is acting in bad faith; both have climate commitments on paper. The point is that the behind-the-meter pathway is structured to make new gas capacity politically invisible, by design, exactly when the climate math says the buildout should be heading the other way.

What gets built in 2026 is what keeps burning in 2046. A 20-year power agreement is a 20-year emissions commitment, and a permit filed this year is a plant that, once sited and financed, is rarely uneconomic to retire early. The Ohio and West Texas projects are the visible template. The question for the next gigawatt of AI capacity is whether it follows the behind-the-meter route, or comes through the same grid-side accountability that has, slowly, made every previous new gas plant a public fight.