No, The US Doesn’t Need Fossil Fuels To Win ‘An AI Arms Race’
As the U.S. braces for a surge in artificial intelligence (AI)–related electricity demand, the natural gas industry has a message for the public: Fossil fuels must power the future’s data centers, the computer-filled warehouses where AI models like ChatGPT primarily train and deploy.
A range of oil and gas industry groups and industry-friendly nonprofits are making the case that AI’s growing hunger for power requires a robust fossil-energy scale-up, DeSmog has found. This massive deployment of dirty power is a national security necessity, they say. And Trump administration officials have embraced this message. But experts on renewable energy economics and deployment say this narrative is misleading. They posit that a new era of gas-powered data centers is neither necessary nor inevitable.