US building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China in AI boom, analysis finds

# Why This Matters The United States is locking in decades of fossil fuel dependence at precisely the moment when climate commitments and renewable energy costs argue for the opposite trajectory. Building gas-fired power plants to serve AI data centers creates long-lived infrastructure that operators will run profitably for 30-40 years, effectively mortgaging carbon reduction targets through the 2050s and beyond. This infrastructure gap also reveals a critical policy failure: the US government has provided substantial subsidies and tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles, yet allowed AI's explosive power demands to be met primarily through natural gas rather than mandating or incentivizing renewable procurement at the scale needed. The practical result is that American competitiveness in AI comes with a hidden climate cost that will prove far more expensive to reverse through future decarbonization efforts than investing in renewable capacity would be today.