AI datacentres plan on-site power stations on huge scale despite climate risks, research reveals

AI infrastructure teams increasingly face a power bottleneck, not a compute bottleneck. Developers planning data centres across the US, UK and mainland Europe have proposed as much as 181GW of on-site gas-fired generation, according to new research. The projects are intended to bypass long waits for connections to national electricity grids. For scale, that capacity is almost four times Great Britain's peak electricity demand. Building dedicated power stations could bring AI clusters online faster and provide predictable supply, but it would also lock in substantial fossil-fuel use and expose operators to fuel-price volatility, carbon costs and permitting challenges. For builders choosing cloud regions or negotiating capacity, energy sourcing is becoming a material part of deployment risk. The findings also put pressure on data-centre operators to disclose how proposed facilities will be powered, and whether gas generation is a temporary bridge or a long-term feature of AI infrastructure.