{"id":187397,"date":"2025-09-28T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/187397\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T11:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T11:00:10","slug":"the-ai-boom-is-confronting-an-inconvenient-truth-about-energy-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/187397\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI boom is confronting an inconvenient truth about energy needs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stargate is a lot of things at once: a $500 billion investment<\/a>, an avatar of modern technology, the culmination of OpenAI\u2019s algorithmic-driven ambitions, and \u2014 perhaps most importantly \u2014 a proxy for the arms race in artificial intelligence that\u2019s taking place globally (It\u2019s also a cult-classic 90s<\/a> television show, but that\u2019s besides the point).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a stark reminder of the transformation that\u2019s sweeping North Texas, as hundreds of data centers bloom across the region, and Texas as a whole. Increasingly, facilities like those toured by The News\u2019 Lana Ferguson in recent months \u2014 who was also on hand at Stargate\u2019s Abilene campus last week<\/a> \u2014 are highlighting the mismatch that exists between energy supplies and voracious AI demand.<\/p>\n

Trillions of dollars and a proportionate degree of anticipation is buttressing the AI economy. But it\u2019s running headlong into a real problem. Namely, there may not be enough energy to power all of the projects expected to come online. Ferguson\u2019s excellent cover story this week is a primer on how this technology is ratcheting up demand on power providers throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area, leading to what one executive says is a \u201csignificant scale issue that we\u2019re dealing with.\u201d <\/p>\n

It raises the question of whether utilities and policymakers are fully prepared for the onslaught of companies joining the likes of Oracle, NVIDIA and OpenAI in tapping into the AI wave, and how that appetite for power will push up electricity prices even more<\/a> for Average Joes and Janes like us.<\/p>\n

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There are concerns about the data center boom\u2019s effect on local power capacity. Yet at an appearance in Westlake on Wednesday<\/a>, Gov. Greg Abbott said that Texas has enough power capacity to meet the needs of the technology players flooding into the state.<\/p>\n

The state is the largest generator and consumer of energy in the U.S., producing the most oil and gas in the nation in addition to ample renewable energy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have wind, solar, nuclear, which we\u2019re adding even more … and, of course, natural gas. And so we have low-cost power, abundant power, that is attracting the AI data centers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Even so, there\u2019s also a growing realization that the juice needed to power the AI race is also playing a role in pushing up fossil fuel use, which has implications for the environment. <\/p>\n

In a recent column<\/a>, Bloomberg\u2019s eminently brilliant Javier Blas zoomed in on International Energy Agency research to illustrate how the \u201cmyth\u201d of peak oil and gas is steadily falling apart, mainly because fossil fuel demand in major economies is expected to stay robust for decades to come. <\/p>\n

Among other findings, the IEA expects oil to remain \u201cthe largest single fuel\u201d well into the second half of this century, for a variety of reasons. But it\u2019s not hard to guess at least one. AI and so-called \u201chyperscale projects\u201d are driving big natural gas needs in Appalachia, Hart Energy recently reported<\/a>, while large scale campuses sprout all over Texas and the Southwest.<\/p>\n

AI\u2019s ascendance is great for growth, but its implacable energy needs are exposing the limitations of current energy policies. Renewable energy is great in isolated cases, but has severe challenges when it comes to scaling and powering large projects like data centers. Meanwhile, nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source \u2014 and it\u2019s undergoing a much-overdue revival \u2014 but those projects are expensive, and take years to develop. <\/p>\n

That leaves oil, gas and coal \u2014 key ingredients in generating electricity<\/a> \u2014 to fill the gap. And the inconvenient truth is that fossil fuels are the only energy source reliable and abundant enough to power industrialized economies \u2014 and all the technology coming online. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stargate is a lot of things at once: a $500 billion investment, an avatar of modern technology, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,59526,181,507,28,101,192,72484,88986,74],"class_list":["post-187397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-environment","tag-future-of-north-texas-economy","tag-future-of-north-texas-energy-environment","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}