THE FARMLAND outside New Albany, Ohio, is disappearing under a layer of steel and concrete that has nothing to do with agriculture. Three natural gas power plants are under construction within a few miles of one another, collectively housing more than 100 engines, turbines, and generators — the kind of equipment typically found in remote oil fields, not suburban townships. Their sole purpose: feeding electricity to data centers that cannot wait for the grid to catch up with artificial intelligence.
The numbers are startling. By the end of 2025, roughly 39 percent of all gas-fired power capacity under development in the United States was designed to serve data centers directly, bypassing the public grid entirely, according to the Global Energy Monitor. A year earlier, that figure was 5 percent. Cleanview, a market intelligence firm, has identified 46 data center projects planning to generate their own power behind the meter, representing a combined 56 gigawatts — enough to rival the total electricity consumption of a mid-sized European country. The largest single project, GW Ranch in West Texas, will consume as much power as Chicago.
The logic is brutally simple. It now takes an average of four years or more for a data center to connect to the U.S. grid, according to JLL, and the hyperscalers building the infrastructure for AI's next generation have no intention of waiting. Elon Musk's xAI set the template in 2024, rolling gas turbines into Memphis on flatbed trucks to power what briefly became the world's largest AI training facility — an approach that drew a Clean Air Act complaint from the Southern Environmental Law Center but also drew imitators across the industry. Where grid queues are measured in years, natural gas generators can be installed in months.
Power plays
But speed has a price — several prices, in fact. Off-grid power is significantly more expensive than its grid-connected equivalent. Investment bank Jefferies estimates that Meta is paying Williams Companies, the Oklahoma pipeline operator building two gas plants for its New Albany data centers, between $140 and $160 per megawatt-hour — a hefty premium over typical wholesale electricity prices. Williams's chief executive, Chad Zamarin, was admirably blunt about the arrangement: the company gets paid whether Meta uses the power or not, for at least a decade. The inefficiency compounds. Smaller gas engines and turbines burn more fuel per unit of electricity than the large combined-cycle plants that anchor the existing grid, and analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that New Albany's new plants will produce more nitrogen oxides per megawatt-hour than Ohio's conventional gas fleet — even accounting for the emissions controls developers have pledged to install.
This creates an awkward tension for companies whose sustainability reports read like climate manifestos. Meta has pledged to reach net-zero emissions across its entire value chain by 2030 — a deadline now less than four years away. The company says it is purchasing renewable energy credits to offset the fossil fuel power it buys, a practice that Meta's own shareholders have challenged as insufficient, given that RECs often do not result in new renewable capacity. Meta's location-based emissions have more than doubled since 2019, according to investor disclosures. Buying offsets while locking into decade-long gas contracts is not so much a bridge strategy as it is building a very expensive house on the bridge and moving in.
The deeper structural question is whether this shadow grid becomes permanent. Siemens Energy, whose equipment is being installed in several off-grid plants, appears skeptical. Its chief executive, Christian Bruch, recently dismissed the notion that smaller turbines represent a durable power solution, calling the approach inefficient and not a smart long-term strategy. Turbine manufacturers face their own dilemma: investing in new production lines for equipment whose demand may evaporate once grid connections improve or nuclear alternatives scale. Gas turbine backlogs already stretch to 2030, according to Global Energy Monitor data, and two-thirds of projects in development have not yet named a turbine supplier. The U.S. nearly tripled its gas-fired capacity in development in 2025, reaching roughly 252 gigawatts — a buildout so rapid that if every planned project comes online, it would expand America's existing gas fleet by nearly half.
For local communities, the trade-offs are immediate and tangible. New Albany's mayor, Sloan Spalding, acknowledged the town has limited power to resist: "For better or for worse, we are the pioneers in this process." The plants under construction could, if grid-connected, power roughly 800,000 homes. Instead they will power servers. Environmental regulators say they have modeled cumulative air quality impacts and are satisfied; residents who live downwind may reach a different conclusion.
The AI industry's appetite for energy shows no sign of abating — the IEA projects data center electricity consumption could double globally by 2030. The real question is whether today's off-grid gas frenzy represents a temporary sprint or a structural commitment to fossil infrastructure that will outlast the grid bottleneck it was built to circumvent. Baker Hughes's chief executive reckons it is no fad. Siemens Energy's chief executive says the installations will not last. Somewhere between those two views, a few hundred billion cubic feet of natural gas will get burned — and the climate targets of the world's most valuable companies will get a great deal harder to hit. ■
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