Source: WIRED
Google is building new data center capacity around a natural gas plant that will emit millions of tons of CO2 annually. The gap between tech giants' net-zero pledges and their actual infrastructure choices is now visible. As AI workloads surge, companies are abandoning the pretense that renewable energy alone can scale fast enough. They are instead retrofitting or building fossil fuel plants—a pragmatic admission that carbon accounting and renewable procurement credits have replaced genuine decarbonization as operating strategy. The infrastructure buildout for AI is being locked into gas for decades, making the sector's climate impact far harder to reverse than its marketing suggests.