Amazon is planning to tap one of the nation’s largest natural gas power plants — and possibly biggest single source of climate-warming emissions — to electrify a data center in West Texas.
Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed Monday that the company will pay the full cost of powering its operations at an 8,000-plus acre site in Pecos County.
“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 is designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow,” Callahan said in a statement.
Texas regulators previously gave a green light for the power generation portion of the Pecos County project to emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. Once completed, developers say the project could generate as much as 7.65 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 1.9 million homes during times of peak demand.
The scale of the new proposed power plant is huge. As of 2024, the dirtiest power plant in the U.S. was the James H. Miller Jr. coal plant in Alabama, which U.S. Energy Information Administration data showed emitted more than 20 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions that year.
The Amazon project details come as developers in Texas are racing to build their own power plants to avoid a waitlist for plugging into the state’s main power grid, which is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. Leaders across the country are closely watching Texas projects as data center pushback mounts, despite state leaders’ past support of a build-out to boost artificial intelligence.
The wait for grid power could take months longer than originally anticipated after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced last week a de facto moratorium on data center approvals until state electricity regulators can audit proposed projects.
Abbott also ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT in June to make sure data centers reuse their own water, reduce the cost of electricity for residential ratepayers, do not disrupt residential neighborhoods and pay for the cost of needed electric infrastructure.
Several large tech companies have agreed to those general standards, including Meta, OpenAI, QTS Data Centers and Skybox.
But even before Abbott’s standards and moratorium were announced, some of the biggest tech companies and proposed data center developers announced plans to build their own power generation units to avoid the grid.
The Texas Commission on Environment Quality this year gave approval to Fermi America to allow it to install more than 5 GW of gas power on its data center site outside of Amarillo.
Microsoft inked a 20-year agreement to buy power from Chevron’s new 2.67-GW natural gas facility in Reeves County, which is west of Pecos County. While Abbott has encouraged data centers to build their own generation, environmental groups worry that tech companies will overwhelmingly choose natural gas power instead of renewable sources of energy.
“One of the dangers of these bring-your-own-power requests to data centers is instead of using much cleaner electricity off of the [ERCOT] grid — which has increasing amounts of wind, solar and batteries — data centers will just build gas plants and increase climate and local air pollution,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas.
Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero CO2 emissions across its global operations by 2040. Amazon officials pointed to 10 GW of carbon-free energy projects it has enabled in Texas since 2010 and said the company is still committed to its net-zero goal.
“We’re also exploring opportunities for solar energy and battery storage on site,” Callahan said. “This new data center campus in Pecos County is a long-term commitment that we expect will create thousands of new jobs.”
But Metzger said the company’s plan to use a giant new gas plant flies in the face of that pledge.
“A lot of [tech companies] are already backtracking or throwing climate goals out the window, and certainly under this administration it’s much easier to do that,” Metzger said. “I think the goal of speed to power trumps everything else, and that comes at a great sacrifice to the nation’s chances of averting the worst of global warming.”
