There's a strange irony at the heart of the AI revolution. The technology that's supposed to carry us into the future is being powered, in part, by the dirtiest energy source of the past. Across the United States, coal plants that were scheduled for retirement are firing back up. Gas turbines are running without permits in residential neighborhoods. And the federal government isn't just looking the other way — it's actively making it easier. This isn't some fringe concern. It's happening right now, at industrial scale, and it's being driven by the biggest names in technology. ## The Numbers Are Staggering A single ChatGPT query consumes roughly ten times the electricity of a Google search. That gap is widening as models get bigger, and the models are always getting bigger. The International Energy Agency estimated in early 2025 that global data center electricity consumption could double by 2030, with AI training and inference responsible for the lion's share of the increase. Goldman Sachs put the expected rise in US data center power demand at 160 percent. To put it plainly: the AI industry is building an energy appetite that rivals some mid-sized countries. US data centers consumed an estimated 176 terawatt-hours in 2023. By some projections, that figure will cross 300 TWh before the decade is out. That's more than the entire nation of Argentina uses in a year. Every major tech company is scrambling to lock down power. Microsoft plans to spend well over $50 billion a year on data center infrastructure. Meta earmarked $65 billion in AI-related capital expenditures for 2025 alone. Amazon, Google, and Oracle are building campuses in every corner of the country where land is cheap and electricity is available. And here's the problem: there isn't enough clean electricity to go around. Not even close. ## The Coal Comeback Nobody Asked For When the AI boom first kicked off in earnest around 2023, the conventional wisdom was that nuclear and renewables would eventually power the data centers. Microsoft inked a historic deal in September 2024 to revive Three Mile Island's shuttered reactor, with Constellation Energy investing $1.6 billion to bring the 837-megawatt plant back online by 2028. Google and Amazon signed their own nuclear agreements. The message was clear: clean energy would fuel the AI future. That was the plan. Reality looks different. Nuclear is, at best, a decade away for most projects. Small modular reactors remain stuck in regulatory limbo. Renewables are growing fast, but they can't keep pace with demand that's doubling every few years. So the industry has turned to what's already there, what's cheap, what can come online tomorrow: fossil fuels. A Cleanview report tracking data center power sources found that roughly 75 percent of new data center energy comes from natural gas. Nearly every project mentions renewables or nuclear in its press releases. But those clean sources aren't scheduled to come online until 2028 or later. The gap between the press release and the power outlet is being filled with gas and, increasingly, coal. In Georgia, plans to retire aging coal plants were reversed after utility companies cited surging demand from data centers. In Virginia — the data center capital of the world — Dominion Energy has been pushing to build new gas-fired generation specifically to serve cloud computing campuses. Across Appalachia, coal plants that had been running at half capacity are ramping back up. It's not just utilities making these decisions. The Trump administration has actively encouraged it. ## The Regulatory Rollback In February 2026, the EPA under Trump effectively gutted its own ability to police power plant pollution. The administration repealed the landmark "endangerment finding" — the legal foundation that gave the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Health and environmental groups, including the American Public Health Association and the Sierra Club, immediately filed suit, but the damage may already be done. The timing isn't accidental. The Trump White House has made AI infrastructure a priority, treating data center buildout as a matter of national competitiveness against China. Environmental regulations are seen as obstacles. So the administration is clearing them away. It's not just about greenhouse gases. It's about local air quality, too. The EPA under Trump has initiated a record-low number of enforcement actions, declining to step in even when companies are blatantly violating the Clean Air Act. ## The xAI Disgrace No company illustrates the problem more vividly than Elon Musk's xAI. In early 2024, xAI built Colossus 1 in South Memphis, Tennessee — right next to historically Black neighborhoods that already bore a disproportionate pollution burden. To power it, the company parked more than 30 gas-powered turbines on tractor trailers and started burning fuel without a permit. Environmental groups caught it. Thermal imaging from the Southern Environmental Law Center revealed the unpermitted turbines in April 2024. Local residents complained about the noise and the air quality. County officials in Tennessee shrugged, claiming the trailers didn't count as stationary sources. The EPA, which has long maintained that such turbines require Clean Air Act permits, did essentially nothing. Emboldened, xAI did it again. By January 2026, the company had built Colossus 2 across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi — a diverse Memphis suburb with already elevated pollution levels. Drone footage from investigative newsroom Floodlight, published in February 2026, showed more than a dozen unpermitted turbines running at full bore, spewing pollutants into the air near at least ten schools within a two-mile radius. "That is a violation of the law," said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing the footage. "You're supposed to get permission first." xAI didn't respond to requests for comment. Mississippi regulators claimed the turbines were "portable" and didn't need permits. The EPA punted to local authorities. Nobody with the power to stop it showed any interest in doing so. Krystal Polk, a longtime Southaven resident whose family home sits directly across the street from the facility, has asthma. She's been forced to abandon the house she'd planned to retire in. "We are a casualty of the whole datacenter race," she said. "I feel that my voice doesn't matter." Now xAI is applying for permits to operate 41 turbines at the site. If they're running them without permits already, one has to wonder what the permit process even means. ## The Corporate Hypocrisy Here's what makes this especially infuriating: every major AI company has a sustainability page. They all publish glossy environmental reports. Microsoft pledged in 2020 to become carbon negative by 2030. By 2023, its greenhouse gas emissions had risen 30 percent, driven almost entirely by data center expansion for AI. The company's own president, Brad Smith, admitted that "the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020." Meta has sustainability goals. Google has sustainability goals. Amazon has sustainability goals. And all of them are building gas-powered data centers as fast as contractors can pour the concrete. It's not that these companies are lying, exactly. It's that they're making promises they can't keep on a timeline that doesn't match reality. The AI race won't wait for clean energy to catch up. So every company is doing the same thing: burning fossil fuels today and promising to go green tomorrow. ## Can Clean Energy Actually Catch Up? The honest answer is: not on the current trajectory. Nuclear could be transformative, but it moves at a glacial pace. Microsoft's Three Mile Island deal won't produce power until at least 2028, assuming regulators approve it. Small modular reactors, the technology everyone pins their hopes on, haven't produced commercial power anywhere in the United States. The NuScale project in Idaho — once the most advanced SMR in the country — was cancelled in 2023 after costs ballooned. Renewables are growing, but intermittency remains a problem for data centers that need 24/7 uptime. Battery storage is improving, though it's nowhere near the scale needed. And the Trump administration's hostility toward wind energy — it paused five major offshore wind projects in December 2025 before courts intervened — isn't helping matters. The energy storage company Redwood Materials put it bluntly in a recent statement: "As electricity demand surges — driven by AI, data centers, manufacturing and electrification — energy storage is no longer optional; it is essential infrastructure." They're right. But "essential" and "available" are two very different things. ## The Bill Will Come Due The AI industry likes to talk about the future it's building. Smarter search. Better medicine. Scientific breakthroughs. Maybe all of that comes true. But right now, in the present, the cost is being paid by people like Krystal Polk — by communities breathing polluted air so that the rest of us can generate images and ask chatbots for dinner recipes. The US is lowering its pollution standards at the exact moment the most power-hungry technology in a generation is scaling up. Coal plants are coming back. Gas turbines are running in backyards. And the regulatory apparatus that's supposed to protect public health is being systematically dismantled. This isn't a future problem. The smokestacks are already running. The question is whether anyone with authority will care before the damage becomes irreversible. Right now, the answer appears to be no.