US Data Centers Are Building Their Own Gas Plants

The US pipeline of gas plants built to power data centers just doubled in six months, climbing from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025 to more than 189 gigawatts by mid-2026, according to Global Energy Monitor. At a rough rule of thumb of one gigawatt per million homes, that is 189 million households' worth of generation sitting in development, not yet built and not yet connected.

The figure, reported by WIRED, is the latest reading from a tracker that put the same pipeline at just 4 gigawatts in early 2024. Most of the new capacity is being built behind the meter: gas plants the data center owns and runs itself, with no electricity flowing onto or off the public grid.

Behind-the-meter generation is a workaround, not a destination. The public grid's interconnection queue, the multi-year waiting list any new power plant must clear to sell electricity into the existing transmission system, has grown long enough that hyperscalers have decided to skip it. The American Action Forum's review of FERC data-center orders shows the queue is now a binding constraint on AI buildout, with grid operators approving data-center load faster than generation can be studied. Microsoft, Meta, Google, and OpenAI have all signed the Trump administration's voluntary "bring your own power" pledge, which formalizes the work around at the federal level.

Operators argue, often convincingly, that private plants insulate ratepayers from price spikes because the data center absorbs both the construction cost and any fuel cost swings. That logic depends on the plant staying online. If a behind-the-meter facility trips offline during a winter cold snap or a summer heat wave, the data center's load still has to be served, and the marginal cost of serving it falls on the regional grid and, eventually, on retail ratepayers. No state public utility commission has yet published a contingency rule for that scenario. The Virginia State Corporation Commission and the Georgia Public Service Commission, the two commissions with the most active data-center siting fights, are the ones to watch.

Three policy choices in the next year will decide whether the current buildout stays private or becomes a public cost.

The first is interconnection reform. The queue exists because regional grid operators review each new plant's impact on reliability, and reviews are slow by design. Behind-the-meter projects bypass the queue entirely. Whether Congress, FERC, or the regional transmission organizations move to expand the queue, accelerate reviews, or let private plants keep skipping it is the first fork.

The second is the ratepayer backstop. Whether state commissions write rules for who pays when a private plant fails and the grid has to pick up the load, and whether federal incentive programs (the "bring your own power" pledge most prominently) require any disclosure of those arrangements, is the second.

The third is the turbine efficiency floor. Many of the plants in the current pipeline are being built with less efficient simple-cycle turbines, the same machines that, in earlier WIRED reporting, pushed per-megawatt-hour emissions well above modern combined-cycle plants. Some of these facilities are permitted to emit more greenhouse gases annually than small or medium-sized countries emit in a year, per prior WIRED coverage. Whether the federal government, EPA, or any state sets a minimum efficiency standard for new data-center gas plants is the third fork.

The voluntary pledge does not address any of the three. It asks signatories to bring their own power but does not require the power to be efficient, does not require disclosure of backstop arrangements, and does not preempt state interconnection reform. The signatories are not the protagonists of the gas buildout; they are the largest customers, and their signatures are the political cover for a buildout that is already happening.

Global Energy Monitor's next tracker update is due in early 2027. The number to watch is not the total pipeline but the share that is behind-the-meter, because that share is what turns a private infrastructure bet into a public one.