Summary: The New York Times and The New Republic reported in August 2026 that Amazon obtained permits for GW Ranch, a Pecos County AI data center campus powered by a 7.65GW natural gas plant. The plant would initially run separate from the Texas grid, and its permit allows 33 million tons of carbon dioxide. The reporting contrasts that scale with Amazon’s 2040 net-zero pledge and notes local opposition.
The New York Times did not hedge in its August 8 headline: Amazon’s new data center will come with the most polluting power plant in the country. The reporting began as an exclusive from the climate newsletter Distilled the week before, which The New Republic then pursued by checking state records. Amazon has bought land and obtained permits in Pecos County, West Texas, for an AI data center campus named GW Ranch — and the project includes a 7.65-gigawatt natural gas plant built to power it.
Pecos County: Three Permits, Land Clearing Already Underway
Three construction permits submitted to the state this week cover three data center buildings on the campus, ready to break ground as soon as they are approved; satellite imagery shows the ground has already been leveled. Pecos County is no stranger to tech companies — Microsoft announced a roughly 2GW campus there in June, together with a 20-year power purchase agreement with Chevron. Amazon chose the same corridor, for the same reasons: plenty of open land, natural gas close at hand, and fewer of the grid constraints that hold projects back elsewhere.
A 7.65GW Plant of Its Own, Off the Texas Grid at First
Permit documents state that the 7.65GW gas plant will initially run “completely separate from Texas’s power grid.” To put the figure in context: 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.
Leaving the grid behind is the emblem of this infrastructure turn. Interconnection queues run for years, so Microsoft, Google, and Meta have each migrated toward data centers that generate their own power behind the meter rather than waiting on utility-scale connections. Residents nearby get one paradoxical upside: a plant that is not attached to the grid cannot directly drive up their electric rates, the complaint heard most often about grid-connected data centers. The air pollution, however, stays local. There is also 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
Here is the number that ignited the fight: 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 once more: 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.