Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.
TechCrunch Anthony Ha ● Covered by 2 sources
Amazon is building a Texas data center powered by a natural gas plant permitted to emit 33 million tons of CO2 a year. That would make it the single largest climate polluter among U.S. power plants.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Anthony Ha — read the original for the full story.
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Amazon wants to power a new data center in Pecos County, Texas, with its own on-site natural gas plant, and according to the New York Times, that plant is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. No other power plant in the country is cleared to emit that much. This isn't a rumor Amazon is denying, either — a company spokesperson confirmed the data center will run on "new on-site generation" and insisted it won't raise electricity costs for Texas families.
That framing matters because data centers have become a political flashpoint, partly over exactly this issue: whether they quietly push up power bills for everyone else nearby. Amazon seems eager to get ahead of that complaint. But sidestepping cost concerns doesn't make the emissions math disappear.
And the math already looks bad. Amazon reported its carbon emissions rose 16% last year, moving in the opposite direction of a pledge the company made to zero out emissions by 2040. AI workloads are a big part of why. Training and running these models eats enormous amounts of electricity, and Amazon isn't alone in reaching for gas-fired plants to keep up with demand — plenty of tech companies are backing similar buildouts to feed their own data centers.
Amazon's spokesperson didn't pretend otherwise. "The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge," they said, while also insisting "our commitment hasn't changed." Those two statements sit awkwardly next to each other, and next to a permit for 33 million tons of annual CO2.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Saying the commitment hasn't changed while quietly building the country's biggest permitted CO2 source is the kind of corporate doublespeak that deserves zero benefit of the doubt. Nobody forced Amazon to chase AI compute this hard, and nobody's forcing it to solve the power problem with gas instead of something cleaner. A 16% emissions jump isn't a rounding error against a 2040 pledge — it's a company choosing speed over the promise it made, and hoping nobody does the arithmetic.
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