For decades, China outbuilt the US on new gas power. That trend just reversed, and AI data centers are the reason why.
Global Energy Monitor's new analysis found the US is now building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China. Including announced and pre-construction projects, the gap widens to nearly three times as much.
A Historic Reversal
US gas power capacity in development rose 50% since January, from 252 gigawatts to 378 gigawatts. That's a third of the entire global total.
If every current project gets built, the US gas fleet grows by roughly two-thirds. The estimated capital cost runs past $647 billion.
Roughly half of that new capacity ties directly to AI data centers. Using gas rather than renewables to power that buildout carries a real cost. Power emissions could rise by as much as 20%, according to one estimate cited in the report.
Jenny Martos, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor, described the shift plainly. "Six months ago, China had more gas plants under construction, but that has now flipped," she said.
"Building all of this gas for AI locks in decades of pollution," Martos said. "It is also locking in dependence on a volatile fuel cost, which will get passed down to rate payers."
Why Gas, Not Renewables
Demand from Google, OpenAI and Amazon's data center buildout created a backlog of the most efficient gas turbines available. That backlog pushed some companies toward a worse alternative.
Elon Musk's xAI is among the companies that switched to smaller, less efficient turbines instead. Those turbines pollute more per unit of power generated.
Water is a separate constraint layered on top. Two-thirds of more than 800 planned data centers nationally sit in drought-stricken areas, according to the report.
The Trump Administration's Bet
The politics here cut in a specific direction. A recent Heatmap poll found three-quarters of Americans don't want to live next to a data center. That's a sharp rise in opposition over the past year.
New York became the first state to enact a temporary ban on new hyperscale data center permitting in July. Dozens of other cities and counties have added their own restrictions.
The Trump administration has taken the opposite approach, eliminating environmental reviews to speed up data center construction. "Data centers could be bigger than oil," Trump said this month, urging state governors to cut taxes to attract them.
"Communities that don't take a datacenter, they're making a mistake," Trump said in separate remarks last week. "Because there's plenty of communities that want them." "It means jobs, and it means tremendous tax revenue."
The International Energy Agency has issued its own forecast on this. It expects US spending on coal and gas power plants to outpace China's for the first time in decades.
What This Means for Miami
This adds an international dimension to the power capacity fights MAIN has tracked across Florida's own data center pipeline this year. That includes SB 484's ratepayer protections and the transmission investment gap documented in the ASCE infrastructure report card.
For Miami's utilities and AI infrastructure investors, this national gas-versus-renewables shift is a real signal about where power costs are heading. A dependence on gas locks in exposure to a genuinely volatile fuel price. That's the same cost risk Florida ratepayers are already fighting to keep off their own bills.
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