It's not the hostile super robots you have to worry about, but the heat they generate.
The Stargate AI data center under construction in Abilene, Texas, on September 23, 2025.
(Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Under the scorching heat of the Louisiana sun, our killers slowly rise from the leveled ground, humming darkly. Here in Richland County, Meta is building a data center so large, Mark Zuckerberg says, that it will span Manhattan from Harlem to Union Square. The giant will consume 2.3 gigawatts of electricity—twice what New Orleans uses on its hottest days. And to keep it running, utility Entergy is building three new gas plants, its first in decades.
The same story is playing out across the country: more AI generates more gas and oil. US electricity demand growing for the first time in more than a decade. Trump even wants to return coaland all into the air-conditioned data centers: those huge rows of whirring, dark, liquid-cooled processors. Big oil makes you dizzy. Comments in Luck advise us not to divest from fossil fuel companies because the big language models we call “artificial intelligence” will “force revaluation transition to clean energy.” And yet we can always be reassured: recent reports Washington Post suggested that individual “AI” queries actually use only a tiny amount of energy.
But those statistics are misleading (Notably, the columnist who suggested them worked with Planet FWD, a company that offers “artificial intelligence-based carbon emissions estimates”). Firstly, videos created by artificial intelligence, which are very energy-intensive, are excluded from the comparison. But it's unsurprisingly downplayed by a publication whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is up to his neck in investing in artificial intelligence data centers.
Instead, we are reassured: AI will decide climate crisis. It requires a ton of dirty energy and billions of resources for now, but it will ultimately revolutionize society for the better, even if the big tech companies can't explain exactly how to do it. Big Tech's immediate promises are a little less exciting: putting Marilyn Monroe on a CGI dragon or ChatGPT's foray into pornography. We hear vague terms like “superman” and “superintelligence” that anthropomorphize algorithms even though study after study warns that the use of these tools undermines our own cognitive and writing abilities.
We are repeatedly told that for this revolution we need to produce more electricity. But the opposite may well be true: data centers are an excuse to squeeze a few more years of fossil fuel profits out of a depleted planet. Just as renewables seemed on track to steadily gain ground, artificial intelligence arrived and the result, in the words of the gleeful CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, is now “political imperative“to speed up the creation of new gas energy. This is not a coincidence. There will always be another excuse. In fact, just a few years ago the excuse was Ukraine.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe stopped importing gas from Russia. This caused something of a panic: Germany was about to run out of energy! Berlin will freeze to death! Fortunately, the United States saved the day by building huge liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals the size of the Death Star along the Gulf Coast.
Fast forward: Berlin never froze to death, but now LNG terminals are decimating Louisiana's coastal communities and the United States has gone from zero LNG exporters to the largest exporter on earth. Even though Germany is moving toward sustainable energy, the damage has already been done: it is locked into LNG import contracts and will be shipping gas to Southeast Asian countries. Once it became clear that there would be no gas shortage requiring LNG in the US, voila, energy-hungry data centers began to proliferate.
Today, Entergy is building its gas plants; Elon Musk's xAI launched dozens of unauthorized gas turbines in Memphis; OpenAI plans to create Stargate in Texas with 10 data centers, each of which can consume more energy than the state's staff. New Hampshire. Big Tech's vision for the future is orderly, grandiose, and largely free of the clutter of human needs: “I do envision that over time, most of the world will be covered in data centers” – Sam Altman I've been thinking recently in the right podcast.
This concept benefits fossil fuel companies because in the data center world, speed and reliability are key. Solar and wind energy will require huge battery capacity to continuously supply enough energy (which can be expensive) and a large area. Gas plants are being built relatively quickly and are receiving subsidies from the Trump administration. As a result, gas, rather than renewable energy, has become the main source of energy for AI-enabled slop bots and Grok's White Supremacy posts. This means that the electricity used by data centers is dirty – approximately 48 percent more carbon intensive than the US average. Even if the promises of future efficiency gains come true, it will be too late: once these plants are built, there will be no turning back. The three gas-fired power plants that will power Meta's artificial intelligence data center in Louisiana are designed to operate for 30 years. By the time the plants are decommissioned, most of Miami-Dade County will already be submerged due to sea level rise.
Every new piece of infrastructure binds us to emissions for decades, while—the science is abundantly clear—we cannot continue to build fossil fuel infrastructure and have a habitable planet. The threat in Louisiana is not abstract. It's immediate.
My neighbors are dying from the heat. My city is shrinking as houses become uninsurable and sea levels rise faster. Successive monster hurricanes make recovery tedious and impossible, and some coastal communities almost completely disappear. Entire barrier islands I once planned to visit no longer exist.
But the AI overlords tell us with a straight face that their products, which I can't draw an accurate map of the United States will somehow solve this crisis, if only we let them make it worse first.
The danger of AI is not that it will become conscious and press the big red button. The ending is much less flashy and much dumber: resource-hungry AI advertising tools will increasingly overwhelm the network, leaving us to cook alive in the sweltering darkness. The hype around artificial intelligence is part of a larger and false narrative that justifies the expansion of fossil fuel use. Let's not be fooled.
