Amazon confirmed it bought a site in Pecos County, Texas, for a data center campus that will be powered by a dedicated 7.65 GW gas-fired plant. The statement was cited by analytics service Cleanview.
Pacifico Energy is building the GW Ranch plant. Permitting documents indicate 35 gas turbines will be installed on site. There are no operating U.S. facilities of this class and capacity; a larger 9.2 GW project in Ohio (with SoftBank) is planned to connect to the grid.
The campus is filed under Amazon Data Services. Applications submitted to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation call for three buildings of about 17,560 square meters and total investment of $900 million ($300 million per facility).
Construction is scheduled for August–December 2026. The purchase price for the land was not disclosed.
Analysts traced the project using satellite imagery: Cleanview matched three permits filed this week to a cleared plot next to the plant construction. The clearing was observed on July 24.
Why companies are bypassing the grid
Connecting to Texas’s ERCOT grid is a lengthy process: interconnection requests are handled in a general queue, with timelines set by the operator. Building an on-site gas plant avoids that constraint because the facility is tailored to specific needs and can be brought online much faster.
Amazon plans to switch to the main grid once interconnection conditions allow.
“Amazon believes in paying the full cost of powering our facilities. Our new data center campus in Pecos County does exactly that: it is powered by new on-site generation that will not increase electricity bills for Texas families,” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said.
Grid operators are factoring the cost of new infrastructure for AI loads into rates, which has already increased bills for U.S. consumers.
In response, the industry has begun adopting autonomous power supply — the first in 2024 was Elon Musk’s xAI, which deployed mobile gas turbines at its data center in Memphis. That project still accounts for most of the 2 GW of operating isolated capacity.
According to Cleanview, since early 2025 data center developers have announced nearly 60 such projects totaling 90 GW. In all, major operators — including Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle — have about 97 GW of this capacity in the pipeline. If built, these projects would emit more than 200 million tons of CO₂ per year, comparable to 45 million cars or the entire country of Pakistan.
Government policy is also accelerating autonomous generation. Earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order streamlining data center construction, and federal agencies have since introduced fast-track approvals.
AI companies and miners are dividing Texas
The state has become the primary location for such projects thanks to available land, simplified permitting, and gas infrastructure.
Forty-eight kilometers west of Amazon’s site, a 2 GW campus with dedicated gas power is being built by Microsoft together with Chevron — the companies announced this in June. Near Fort Stockton, AI startup Poolside is developing the 226-hectare, 2 GW Horizon project; it was announced in October 2025 with CoreWeave, though CoreWeave later exited.
Separately, Amazon is negotiating a 4.5 GW plant in Homer City, Pennsylvania.
The crypto industry adopted the same model earlier: bitcoin miners have for years sited facilities next to cheap energy sources and connected directly.
Now AI developers are targeting such sites, and miners themselves are repurposing capacity for high-performance computing.
In July, Galaxy Digital completed the first phase of converting the Helios campus in Texas from mining to AI and handed CoreWeave 133 MW of critical IT load. MARA Holdings announced the $1.5 billion acquisition of the Long Ridge energy complex in Ohio, and SpaceX is building its own gas plants for the Terafab factory, also in Texas.
Permit for 33 million tons of emissions
Separate from construction approvals, the project received an emissions permit in January. Texas allowed the plant to emit up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — about 5% of Canada’s annual emissions. A separate permit allows more than 12,000 tons per year of regulated pollutants, including soot, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds.
For comparison, the current U.S. leader — the James Miller coal plant in Quinton, Alabama — emits about 16 million tons.
Burning coal results in higher emissions per unit of energy than gas, but the Amazon plant would surpass the Alabama facility in scale. Both types of generation emit pollutants that contribute to smog and are associated with cardiovascular disease and asthma.
“This will have a colossal impact on the environment and public health,” said Catherine Guerra, campaigns director at advocacy group Public Citizen.
Amazon is considering installing solar panels and energy storage, and plans to use brackish groundwater (not suitable for drinking) for site needs to reduce pressure on the local watershed. Pacifico Energy, for its part, said it intends to build up to 750 MW of solar generation and 1.8 GW of storage at GW Ranch.
Even so, the project conflicts with Amazon’s climate commitments under the Climate Pledge, which it co-founded. The pledge calls for the company to reach carbon neutrality by 2040, but emissions have been rising in recent years.
Amazon has previously acknowledged that AI workloads could become an obstacle.
“The world looks different now than when we co-founded the Climate Pledge. But our commitments have not changed,” Callahan said.
As evidence of its intentions, the company pointed to 40 carbon-free energy projects totaling nearly 10 GW that it is supporting in Texas.
In August, Reuters journalists estimated that the AI boom resulted in $1 trillion in commitments for Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and Alphabet.
