AI is hungry for power and the companies behind the technology are trying stop the nuclear reactors to feed it. But nuclear reactors take a long time to build and AI will need many years of electricity before they are ready. So where does it come from? In the US, natural gas. The AI ​​revolution will pump more carbon into the air.

A new report from the Financial Times details the future natural gas boom. As climate change worsens, the world is turning away from polluting energy sources like coal and natural gas. The U.S. power grid is booming with renewables and gas-based power production has slowed over the past half-decade.

In 2024 it will explode thanks to data centers and AI. According to the Financial Times, the US power grid’s dependence on gas will only increase. America will add up to 80 new gas-fired power plants by 2030. That’s 20 percent more than added in the previous five years.

On January 14, President Biden released an executive order which clears the way for greater AI and energy infrastructure expansion. The order directs the Pentagon and the DOE to lease federal land to private companies seeking to build “gigawatt scale AI data centers.”

As part of the bargain, companies looking to build on federal land must do so with so-called clean energy. “To support these efforts, the Department of the Interior will identify lands it administers as suitable for clean energy that can support data centers at DOE and DOD sites, while improving permitting processes for geothermal projects,” the order said. “The DOE will take additional steps to develop distributed energy resources, advance the deployment of clean generation resources at existing interconnection points, and support safe and responsible deployment of nuclear energy.”

According to a recent report from the US Department of Energy, data center energy use is expected to triple by 2028. “This increase in data center power demand, however, must be understood in the context of the greater demand for electricity that is expected to occur in the next few decades from a combination of electric vehicle adoption, onshoring of manufacturing, hydrogen utilization, and the electrification of industry and buildings,” said the report.

Meta is researching nuclear energy, but it needs power now. The tech company is spending $10 billion in Louisiana on a data center and $3.2 billion on three new gas plants to power it. Microsoft has partnered with Constellation to bring reactor unit three of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back online. Last week, Constellation announced that it was buying Calpinea large gas power company, at $27 billion.

American gas plants pump more than 1 billion tons of carbon in the air last year. That is the highest amount ever recorded. There are ways to reduce the carbon produced by natural gas plants, but many of the 80 slated for construction are not equipped with carbon capture systems.

According to DOE, gas power plants and data centers are black boxes. “As US data centers increasingly engage in on-site power generation, power purchase agreements, and trading of various carbon credits, the lack of transparency in the details of these activities for all data center operators in the US withheld from the overall analysis,” the DOE said in the report.

“In addition to limiting the scope of this report, this lack of transparency highlights that data center development is occurring with little consideration of how best to integrate these emerging workloads into the expansion of power generation/transmission or for wider community development.”

In the announcement about Meta’s Louisiana data centers, Entergy—the company’s energy partner—SAYS it can add clean, efficient power plants to its system to meet growing electricity demand. It is not big on the exact details of its gas plants. “Meta has pledged to match its electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy and will work with Entergy to bring at least 1,500 MW of new renewable energy to the grid through the Geaux program Zero,” the press statement.

The Geaux Zero program is a local tariff that encourages the purchase of solar power. Buying some renewable energy doesn’t mean carbon will stop being pumped into the sky, Meta just promised to buy solar to go with it.

The dream, of course, is for all these new data centers and AI systems to run on renewable and nuclear energy. The truth is that nuclear energy works slowly. It can take a decade to spin up a traditional reactor and many of the smaller cutting systems are untested, undeployed, and unproven.

It’s possible that big tech is on the cusp of a nuclear revolution thanks to the incentives created by AI. But it needs to burn a lot of natural gas to get there before the reactors come online.