The New York Times put it plainly in its August 8 headline: Amazon’s new data center is set to have the most polluting power plant in the U.S. The story traces back to an exclusive from the climate newsletter Distilled the week before, which The New Republic then followed up by checking state documents. Amazon has purchased land and secured permits in Pecos County, West Texas for an AI data center campus called GW Ranch — and the plan includes building its own 7.65-gigawatt natural gas plant to power it.
Pecos County: Three Permits, Land Clearing Underway
Three construction permits filed with the state this week cover three data center buildings, to be built immediately upon approval; satellite imagery shows land clearing has already started. This is not Amazon’s first move in the region, and tech companies know Pecos County well — Microsoft announced a roughly 2GW campus there in June, paired with a 20-year power purchase agreement with Chevron. Amazon picked the same stretch of West Texas for the same reasons: wide-open land, nearby natural gas, and few of the grid constraints that slow projects elsewhere.
A 7.65GW Self-Built Plant, Off the Texas Grid at First
According to permit documents, the 7.65GW gas plant will initially run “completely separate from Texas’s power grid.” For scale: that is nearly four times the neighboring Microsoft campus, and The New Republic suggests it may be the biggest gas power plant in the country.
Going off-grid is the emblem of this infrastructure turn. Interconnection queues stretch for years, so Microsoft, Google, and Meta have each moved toward data centers that bring their own power behind the meter rather than waiting for utility-scale connections. For local residents there is a paradoxical upside: a plant not attached to the grid cannot directly push up their electric rates, one of the most common complaints about grid-connected data centers. The air pollution, however, stays local. And there is a systemic wrinkle worth naming: every gigawatt a company builds for itself is a gigawatt of demand that never shows up in utility planning, which is precisely what makes projects like GW Ranch both hard to scrutinize and hard to stop.
33 Million Tons: More Than America’s Biggest Coal Plant
The number igniting the fight is this: the state permit would allow the plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide. Citing analysis from Cleanview, Distilled reports that this would surpass Plant Bowen in Georgia — the largest coal plant in the U.S. — and make GW Ranch the biggest pollution site in the country. Read that again: a gas plant’s permitted emissions exceeding what the nation’s largest coal plant actually emits. It is a concrete measure of how much electricity the AI buildout consumes and how far companies will go to secure it.
Climate Pledges and Small-Town Backlash
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge, committing to net-zero carbon by 2040. In response to the reporting, Amazon says it already powers its existing Texas data center operations with 10 gigawatts of carbon-free energy across 40 projects, and that GW Ranch will use non-potable brackish groundwater rather than drinking water. The New Republic is skeptical of the water math, pointing to drought pressures in the region — brackish or not, a campus of this scale drinks a lot of groundwater. And the 33-million-ton permit sits right there in the paperwork; the tension between that number and a net-zero target will not be smoothed over with press language.
The political wind matters too. Rural opposition to data centers is now a bipartisan phenomenon: few permanent jobs are created, while higher utility rates and blackout risks are shared by everyone around. The New Republic even argues the coming backlash will be a right-wing one — rural West Texas is heavily Republican, and opposition to data centers there is growing regardless of national politics. The Times notes that a plant of this size, built as planned, could set off the next wave of pushback in normally business-friendly West Texas. For an industry staring down interconnection queues, self-built plants bypass the grid — they do not bypass environmental review, local acceptance, or your own climate commitments.
Sources
- New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S. — The New York Times
- Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country — The New Republic
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.