By 2030, the buildout of data centers in the United States could push back by fifteen years the progress made in cutting greenhouse gases. That is the estimate of the Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental preservation organizations in the country, which says carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. power sector alone would reach 2.1 billion metric tons. The overall level, according to the organization, would be comparable to that of all of Mexico.
The figure is not limited to facilities already running. It includes projects under construction that are fuelling the race to build artificial intelligence. Compared with 2025, the power sector would see a 42% increase in emissions. Earlier estimates from the researchers were between a quarter and half of today's projections. "The numbers continue to sort of boggle our minds," said Jeremy Fusher, the Club's principal advisor for climate and energy.
The bottleneck is speed. In an AI-driven market, construction speed is king, and green sources are unlikely to keep pace with demand. Turbines have become scarce too: their prices have risen by 50%, and production at some makers is backlogged until 2032. As with RAM, GPUs and storage, data centers are absorbing the available supply.
Rules are moving, but slowly. Several countries and states now require that a large share of power for new data centers come from green sources. Those rules rarely apply retroactively and often include a phase-in period. Ireland's law requiring 80% renewable power, for example, applies six years after a facility is powered up.
What is harder to predict is how many data centers will actually be completed. Brendan Pierpont of Energy Innovation points to turbine availability, grid connection delays and other obstacles. Permit requests far exceed the grid capacity available across the United States, and a significant number of projects are running into roadblocks. Concerns about hyperscaler economics could also sink some projects if the AI bubble deflates.
Local resistance
The issue is already on the political agenda. Opposition to new facilities is growing across the United States, and some communities have forced developers to withdraw projects worth billions of dollars. For people living near data centers, the question is no longer only how to power tomorrow's technology, but how to do it responsibly today.
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