US Data Centers to Burn More Gas Than Germany, Japan
Update, Sept. 17: the gas buildout keeps accelerating beyond the grid. Google has proposed building its own utility-scale gas plant alongside a data center in Nebraska, Canary Media reports — but clean-energy veteran Jigar Shah warns the behind-the-meter strategy has hard limits: gas turbines are in short supply, and so is the workforce needed to maintain them. Meanwhile BNEF notes the grid itself is the bottleneck: the record for new data-center capacity connected in a single year is 7.1 gigawatts, and even sustaining that pace leaves a projected 19-gigawatt shortfall by 2035.
Nine months ago, the forecasters at BloombergNEF looked at America's AI-driven data center buildout and put a number on the natural gas it would need: roughly half of what they're saying now. Their new forecast, first reported by Bloomberg News on September 14 and detailed by TechCrunch's Tim De Chant on September 15, projects that by 2035 U.S. data centers will consume about 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day — more than Germany and Japan combined, and nearly double BloombergNEF's own December 2025 prediction.
That is not a rounding error. It is a confession: the AI boom's appetite for electricity is growing faster than even the professionals built to model it can keep up with. And while the headlines will belong to Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, the people most exposed to the consequences of this forecast are not in Silicon Valley boardrooms. They are utility ratepayers — ordinary households and businesses whose gas and electric bills sit directly in the blast radius of the coming demand surge.
Photo: Chad Davis, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
A forecast that doubled in nine months
Start with the scale of the revision. BloombergNEF's grid-connected component of the forecast — the gas burned by power plants feeding data centers through the grid — stood at 6.9 billion cubic feet per day in the December 2025 outlook. It is now 15 billion cubic feet per day. That is more than a doubling, and it happened in roughly nine months of real-world buildout data.
The new forecast is not a hype-driven number. BloombergNEF explicitly accounts for the fact that not all announced data center projects will actually be completed, meaning the revision is driven by how quickly real projects are breaking ground, how large they are getting, and how much on-site generation developers are willing to finance themselves.
The comparison BloombergNEF and TechCrunch use is deliberately jarring. Germany burns roughly 9 billion cubic feet of gas per day across its entire economy, per StartupFortune's reporting on the forecast — add Japan and you still do not reach what American server farms are projected to consume daily by 2035. Data centers become the second-strongest driver of U.S. natural gas demand growth through 2035, trailing only liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to the rest of the world.
The on-site gas boom is only the appetizer
Much of the public attention has gone to the behind-the-meter power plants — the natural gas generators that Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are building on or beside their own campuses to bypass the grid entirely. BloombergNEF puts those on-site plants at 2.9 to 3.4 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2035. To grasp the speed of this industry: that range alone is about as much natural gas as all U.S. data centers consume today, grid power included.
But the headline-grabbing on-site plants turn out to be the smaller part of the story. The grid-connected fleet — data centers pulling power from utilities that burn gas on their behalf — is projected to drive an additional 15 billion cubic feet per day of power-sector gas demand by 2035. BloombergNEF's framing is blunt: that growth is five times larger than the combined demand growth of every other grid-connected sector through 2035.
Gas, in other words, is not a bridge fuel for AI data centers. It is the plan. BloombergNEF expects natural gas to supply 69 percent of the electricity for newly built, grid-connected AI data centers through 2035, according to StartupFortune's reporting — a startling admission in an industry that spent the last decade signing renewable power purchase agreements and touting clean-energy pledges.
The 99-plant gas pipeline, state by state
A separate BloombergNEF analysis published in August found 99 gas plants in development specifically to power data centers, spread across 22 states from Alaska to Georgia. More than a third sit in Texas, where oil-and-gas infrastructure already exists and permitting moves fast. The backers read like a who's who of the AI arms race: Amazon and Microsoft alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. Run at typical industry rates, those 99 plants alone would emit about 318 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — roughly 20 percent of what the entire US power sector emitted last year. Run flat out to meet AI demand around the clock, that share climbs toward a third.
Why the grid can't keep up
The buildout's pace explains why developers keep reaching for gas. BloombergNEF has tracked 124 gigawatts of announced behind-the-meter natural gas capacity for data centers — but only 56 percent of it is tied to specific commissioning dates, a sign of how speculative the pipeline still is. A separate BloombergNEF analysis in August found 99 gas plants in development specifically to power data centers, spread across 22 states from Alaska to Georgia, with more than a third sitting in Texas, where oil and gas infrastructure already exists and permitting moves fast.
The companies backing those projects read like a who's who of the AI arms race: Amazon and Microsoft alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. Run at typical industry rates, those 99 plants alone would emit about 318 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly 20 percent of what the entire U.S. power sector emitted last year, per StartupFortune. Run flat out to meet AI demand around the clock, that share climbs toward a third.
Behind-the-meter generation is, above all, a shortcut around the queue. A company that builds its own gas plant does not wait on a utility or a grid operator to approve an interconnection. In an industry where the prize goes to whoever deploys compute first, that speed is worth more than any subsidy.
The financing is already flowing at record scale — CoreWeave just tapped Wall Street for up to $6.4 billion in a single morning to keep building. The buildout is also global — Anthropic just signed its first Australian lease at a proposed 2.16-gigawatt Queensland campus.
Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The bill lands on your utility bill
Here is where the forecast gets personal for American households. The entire data center buildout of recent years has rested on an assumption of stable natural gas prices — cheap, abundant fuel flowing from U.S. shale. Analysts at Noreva think that assumption is a false hope. The combined force of exploding data center demand and rising LNG exports, they argue, could make natural gas prices soar.
Tech companies can afford the hit. Their balance sheets are the deepest on Earth, and energy is a manageable fraction of their cost structure. Utility ratepayers have no such cushion. When new generation gets built to serve data centers, utilities tend to pass those costs to customers — and as TechCrunch noted earlier this year, that dynamic has already triggered a public backlash against data center projects in several states. Noreva's warning, as reported by De Chant, is that even if Big Tech can shrug off a gas price surge, the families and small businesses behind the same utility meters might not be able to.
This is the political economy the forecast barely whispers about: the AI race's energy appetite is being financed, in part, by a public that never signed up for it. Every grid-connected gigawatt of data center demand is a bid in the same gas market that heats homes and runs factories.
The climate math is ugly
Then there is the atmosphere. Burning one cubic foot of natural gas releases the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide once extraction, processing, and distribution are counted, according to the International Energy Agency. BloombergNEF's demand increase therefore works out to roughly one million additional metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution per day — about 12 percent of total present-day U.S. emissions, per Our World in Data figures cited by TechCrunch.
Twelve percent is a staggering share of a country's emissions to assign to a single industry's growth — especially an industry that marketed itself, until very recently, as the path to a cleaner, more optimized economy. The gas plants being permitted now will run for decades, locking in emissions long after the current hype cycle cools.
Can efficiency save it?
Not all of the industry's answers are about burning more fuel. One promising line of work is making data centers flexible grid assets — facilities that can dial their power draw up and down to match renewable output and relieve grid stress, instead of simply demanding more electrons at all hours. That is exactly the aim of the Google–NVIDIA–Emerald AI alliance to turn AI data centers into flexible grid assets, which we covered earlier this week.
It is worth being honest about the limits. Flexible demand is a real and valuable tool: it shaves peaks, absorbs surplus solar, and can defer some new generation. But it does not erase 18 billion cubic feet a day of demand. Flexibility manages the timing of consumption; the forecast is about the volume. Nobody in the industry has explained how you flex your way out of a doubling.
The BloombergNEF revision is best read as a warning with a date on it. In nine months, the professional forecasters doubled their estimate of the AI boom's gas appetite — and that estimate already assumes some projects fail. The question for the next nine months is not whether data centers will need more gas. It is who pays when the bill comes due, and whether the people paying will get a say before they start.
Other startups are skipping the gas question entirely — modular solar-powered data centers like Rune's plug straight into solar farms.
Sources: TechCrunch, Sept. 15, 2026 (Tim De Chant, primary reporting); Bloomberg News, Sept. 14, 2026 (via TechCrunch attribution); StartupFortune, ~Sept. 16, 2026; Bloomberg Tax, Sept. 14, 2026; BloombergNEF outlook materials; International Energy Agency; Our World in Data. Related: our earlier report on the Google–NVIDIA–Emerald AI alliance to turn AI data centers into flexible grid assets.
Data center power FAQ: will my utility bill go up?
Short answer: it depends on your state — but the risk is real. Utilities tend to pass the cost of new generation to customers, and the Trump administration has urged data centers to "bring their own power," yet much of the buildout remains grid-connected. Analysts at Noreva warn the combined force of data-center demand and rising LNG exports could push natural gas prices up. Tech giants can absorb the hit; households and small businesses behind the same utility meters may not be able to.
The grid itself is part of the problem. BNEF says the all-time record for new data-center capacity connected in a single year is 7.1 gigawatts — and even at that pace it projects a 19-gigawatt shortfall by 2035. Public backlash against data-center projects has already surfaced in several states; who pays for the AI boom's power is the fight to watch through 2026.
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