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  • Hacker News
  • It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
    by raincole
  • Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
    by conception
  • These lucky Texans get to enjoy all this AI data center natural gas powerplant pollution.
    by pseudosavant
  • [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
    by ChrisArchitect
  • At this point, there are enough commenters in both threads to justify a merger.
    by fhdkweig
  • Someone’s gotta stop this who idk - that’s the problem
    by vladmk
  • It's important to distinguish the toxic SOX/NOX emissions from CO2 which is not toxic but is a greenhouse gas. These two categories and materially different and conflating them is very risky. For example if this were to replace an equivalently sized coal plant it would be a net improvement
    by redwood
  • Carbon tax would shift the economics in favor of renewables.
    by coralreef
  • I don’t think it would - tokens are so profitable and the race dynamics make the deployment timelines for most renewables untenable.

    Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.

    by chaos_emergent
  • A carbon tax would have been a fantastic solution in the 1990s

    It is too late now. There are no pare to optimal solutions left

    by worik
  • Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
    by javierluraschi
  • Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
    by paulkrush
  • https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-... Solar dc data centers are marginally cheaper. However right now the incentives are on buliding data centers (including power sources) the fastest. Despite this i would bet that you could build solar and batteries as fast as (or even faster) as building gas power plants, but the current governmend really likes to see fossils and setting the planet on fire.
    by thatsit
  • Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.
    by synack
  • A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
    by wat10000
  • efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics

    it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)

    but concentration definitely will rise

    by NooneAtAll3
  • If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
    by neuronexmachina
  • A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?

    Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.

    A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.

    by Grombobulous
  • At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.

    Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.

    West Texas is basically Mad Max 2.

    by MarkWayneNewton
  • No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.

    Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.

    Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.

    Stop burning fossil fuels.

    by mrpopo
  • Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350

    256 comments, 8 hours ago

    by fhdkweig
  • Some thoughts:

    * you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).

    * running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).

    * the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.

    * The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.

    * in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.

    by rgmerk
  • > you can run data centres on grid electricity

    The reason they're not doing that is because grid providers can't grow their supply fast enough to support new AI data centres.

    by kristianp
  • Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.

    We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.

    by throwaway473825
  • Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(

    https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...

    by zepearl
  • Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it.

    Especially if he buys from his own company.

    by deepsun
  • Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...

    That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.

    by culi