New York became first state to enact hyper-scale datacenter ban

A Global Energy Monitor (Gem) analysis found that the United States is now building twice as much gas-fired power generation capacity as China — and more than any other country in the world — after a 76% increase in under-construction projects during the first half of 2026. When announced and pre-construction projects are included, the US is building nearly three times as much as its “fellow global economic powerhouse,” Gem said.

Since January, US gas power capacity in overall development has risen by 50%, climbing from 252GW to 378GW — roughly a third of the global total. If all of those projects are built, the United States would increase its gas fleet by approximately two-thirds at a capital cost of more than $647 billion, according to the report.

“Six months ago, China had more gas plants under construction but that has now flipped,” said Jenny Martos, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor. She added that “there has been an enormous surge in datacenter proposals powered by gas in the past year and the climate implications of that is huge,” because “building all of this gas for AI locks in decades of pollution and it is also locking in dependence on a volatile fuel cost, which will get passed down to rate payers.”

Around half of the new US capacity is directly tied to upcoming datacenters that will require large amounts of electricity to handle AI demand, Gem found. Using gas rather than renewables to power these new datacenters could increase US power-sector emissions by as much as 20%, according to one estimate cited in the report.

For decades, China’s rapid economic growth had outpaced US additions of new gas power generation. Gem attributed the reversal both to a “frenzy” in US datacenter construction and to China’s rapid adoption of clean energy. The International Energy Agency has forecast that US spending on coal- and gas-fueled power plants will outstrip China’s for the first time in decades.

President Donald Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly claimed that China — the world’s largest carbon polluter — is expanding its fossil fuel use so much that any US emissions cuts would be futile. Trump said of China that “their air is dirty, and it drifts over to us.”

A surge in datacenter proposals by Google, OpenAI and Amazon has contributed to a backlog of the most efficient gas turbines used for accompanying power plants. Several companies, including Elon Musk’s xAI, have switched to smaller, less efficient turbines that produce more pollution per unit of electricity generated, according to the report.

Local opposition to datacenter construction has grown as concerns have mounted over the climate crisis, rising power bills, tax breaks for AI companies and water shortages — two-thirds of the more than 800 planned datacenters are located in drought-stricken areas, the report said. A recent Heatmap poll found that three-quarters of Americans do not want to live next to a datacenter, a sharp increase in opposition compared with a year earlier.

Dozens of cities and counties have placed restrictions on new datacenters. In July, New York became the first state to enact a temporary ban on new hyper-scale datacenter permitting and construction.

Despite the local restrictions, the Trump administration has supported datacenter construction and eliminated environmental reviews to speed approvals. Trump said earlier this month that “data centers could be bigger than oil” and urged state governors to cut taxes to encourage them.

“Frankly, communities that don’t take a datacenter, they’re making a mistake because there’s plenty of communities that want them,” Trump told his former lawyer Michael Cohen in separate remarks last week. “Because it means jobs, and it means tremendous tax revenue coming into the towns and cities that take them.”