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Environment

Data centres may soon burn as much extra gas as California uses daily

In support of their AI ambitions, tech companies are rapidly expanding US data centres, and this growth is on track to significantly increase US gas demand by 2030

By Jeremy Hsu

31 October 2024

A power substation near a data centre in Virginia

Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Silicon Valley’s scramble to build more data centres could boost US demand for natural gas by the equivalent of another New York State or California within a decade, with much of this expansion due to the energy cost of training and using artificial intelligence.

“If the world wants all [AI] workloads to be powered only by sustainable power in 2030 from currently available technologies, it will have to temper its AI initiative,” Aneesh Prabhu and his colleagues at S&P Global, a financial information and…

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