The New Era of the Gas Mega-Plant

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This morning, OpenAI announced that it is leasing an enormous data center facility that will be built in Pike County, Ohio. The facility’s ownership structure will be arcane, to say the least: It will be built on federal land, operated by a subsidiary of the Japanese firm SoftBank, and partially backstopped by the chip designer Nvidia. The project is the most significant example so far of the increasingly creative off-book financing that’s now driving the artificial intelligence boom.

For our purposes, though, what sticks out about the facility is not its financing per se but the scale of its energy demand. The supercomputer will consume 10 gigawatts of electricity, or roughly as much power as New York City demands on a summer day.

To supply this energy, the Energy Department will build and own … a 9.2-gigawatt natural-gas-burning power plant on-site. It will be financed by the Japanese government and operated by SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary. Although this power plant was announced back in March as part of President Donald Trump’s trade deal with Japan, it wasn’t as clear then whether it would actually get built. Nvidia’s involvement raises the odds that it will reach completion. (In any case, it will get built in stages.)

There are several notable things about this extraordinary — and enormous — power plant, assuming that it does get built. Upon completion, it would rank as the largest power plant in the United States, nearly 40% larger than the Grand Coulee Dam. It would also become one of the largest natural gas power plants in the world, rivaling the Jebel Ali Power and Desalination Plant in Dubai. The scale of natural gas throughput required to feed the plant will resemble that required for a large liquified natural gas export facility; simply feeding the plant everyday could eat up a sizable chunk of, say, Ohio’s overall natural gas production.

There’s much we still don’t know about this power plant as well, including what kind of turbine it will use. That question will play a big role in its overall greenhouse emissions and air pollution footprint — although no matter what it will become a major polluter.

It will inaugurate, as well, a new era of national gas mega-plants. We learned earlier this month, for instance, that Amazon is behind a 7.65-gigawatt gas-burning facility being built in Texas dubbed Gigawatt Ranch. That enormous plant, if built, will also outrank the Grand Coulee Dam. (The market research company Cleanview first reported Amazon’s involvement in the facility.) The data center developer Nexus has proposed a 6-gigawatt gas-burning facility near Hubbard, Texas, as well — another enormous power plant. Since the beginning of the fracking boom, natural gas has been distinguished in part by its highly modular nature: For both regulatory and technical reasons, it’s been possible to erect a gas-burning power plant in a variety of sizes in a variety of places on the grid. The rise of these newly behemoth gas-burning facilities suggests that we might be in a new era of truly behemoth gas development.

And what makes the Ohio facility different from the Texas examples, too, is that it's going to be owned by the U.S. government. It's essentially going to be a public natural gas-burning power plant. That has interesting implications for climate and energy policy, because the government’s involvement could bring it under the auspices of future federal regulation — or even executive authority. While its continued operation will likely be protected by two-way federal contracts with Nvidia, SB Energy, and other counterparties, the Trump administration has already stretched the bounds of contract law to allow for, let’s say, entrepreneurial federal policy making on its chosen issues. AI is not exactly popular as is. In a different political moment, with a different mandate, how might a future Democratic president look at this site?