AI Will Spew Gas Fumes for Years Before the Nuclear Revolution Takes Off
AI is power hungry and the companies behind the tech are striving to stand up nuclear reactors to feed it. But nuclear reactors take a long time to build and AI will need massive amounts of power years before they’re ready. So where will it come from? In the U.S., natural gas. The AI revolution will pump a lot more carbon into the air.
A new report from the Financial Times detailed the coming natural gas boom. As climate change worsened, the world turned away from polluting sources of energy like coal and natural gas. The U.S. power grid was making progress on renewables and gas-based power production had slowed down over the past half decade.
In 2024 it exploded thanks to data centers and AI. According to the Financial Times, the U.S. power grid’s reliance on gas will only go up. America will add upwards of 80 new gas power plants by 2030. That’s 20 percent more than was added in the last five years.
On January 14, President Biden issued an executive order that cleared the way for even greater AI and energy infrastructure expansion. The order directed the Pentagon and the DOE to lease federal land to private companies looking to build “gigawatt scale AI data centers.”
