Amazon data center plant in Texas could become America’s biggest polluter
Amazon data center plant in Texas could become America’s biggest polluter
Josh MarcusSun, August 9, 2026 at 1:30 AM UTC
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A future Amazon data center will be powered by a gas plant that could become the largest carbon polluter in the country, complicating the company’s climate commitments (Getty)
The natural gas plant powering a sprawling Amazon data center project in Texas could become the largest climate polluter in the country, despite the company’s commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2040.
As part of a planned data center campus in Pecos County, the tech giant is investing in an on-site natural gas power plant, the company has confirmed.
The plant is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to documents obtained by The New York Timesand the climate research outlet Distilled.
If the final plant matches those specifications, it would be the largest single source of climate pollution in the country, according to the Times, more than doubling the emissions from Alabama’s James H. Miller Jr. Power Plant, a coal facility which emits about 16 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. (Power plants don’t always emit the maximum they are allowed to, and the Amazon facility is still in early-stage construction.)
The company has emphasized that the power plant would not raise rates for Texas residents.
“Amazon believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to TheIndependent on Saturday. “Our new planned data center campus in Pecos County does just that: it’s powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families and designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.”
Amazon is “exploring opportunities for solar energy and battery storage on site,” according to the company. The Pecos project is expected to create “thousands of new jobs,” Amazon said.
The site is reportedly Amazon’s first major investment in off-grid power for a data center.
This puts them in league with “hyperscalers” including Microsoft, Google and Meta, which have all invested in fossil fuel power sources this year as tech companies race to get enough data centers online to meet the ravenous demand for artificial intelligence.
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The data campus is the latest complication in Amazon’s highly touted climate commitments.
The company has long faced criticism for working with fossil fuel firms, and its emissions have largely continued to rise since it unveiled its climate commitment in 2019.
High demand for AI has sparked both a data center boom and a power crunch, prompting tech companies to invest in new fossil fuel power sources (Reuters)
“We recognize that the path to being a more sustainable company is not a straight line,” Amazon said in its recently released sustainability report about 2025. “Though our emissions increased in 2025, we remain steadfast in our commitment to sustainability.”
Asked about the Texas project, Amazon said it remained committed to its climate pledge and pointed to its past record of backing 40 renewable energy projects in the state.
Data centers have increasingly provoked a political backlash, with criticisms honing in on everything from the centers’ environmental emissions to their water use and impact on electricity rates.
This week, the state of Texas pause new data center projects until state electricity regulators could complete an audit of each proposed facility.
“Simply put, Texans must come first,” Republican Governor Greg Abbott wrote in a statement.
The governor’s office noted that approximately 90 percent of the new power requests on the Texas grid are for data centers — facilities that are seeking 474 gigawatts of electricity, more than five times the state’s peak electricity demand record on the grid covering most of the state.
The Trump administration has pushed to speed up data center construction, including by redeveloping federal land to host the facilities, which consume far more electricity than typical data centers and are forecast to imperil global plans to stop the climate crisis.
High demand for data centers, mixed with delays in building new grid connections and power sources, has sent tech companies in search of alternatives, ranging from building bespoke, on-site natural gas plants to investing in future nuclear reactors.
Source: “AOL Money”
