Will new data centers wipe out 15 years of US emissions cuts?

01The short version

• The Sierra Club projects US power-plant emissions of 2.1 billion tons in 2030, up 42% from 2025, if all planned AI data centers are finished on time. Most of the jump comes from gas plants built off the grid.
• The analysis is described as internal, and we could not find it published. The headline is Futurism's wording; Bloomberg's own headline said the buildout 'risks' erasing progress.
• Rhodium Group, which models the whole grid, still has power-plant emissions falling 22% to 27% by 2030. Other think tanks see a serious risk, not a certainty.

02Where the claim came from

On October 28, Bloomberg reported on what it called an internal Sierra Club analysis of AI data centers. Adding the projects now planned, the group projects that the US power sector would emit about 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2030, which is 618 million tons, or about 42%, more than in 2025.¹ Futurism ran a short rewrite a few days later under a stronger headline.² We could not find the Sierra Club analysis published, so what follows rests on Bloomberg’s account of it.

03What the evidence actually shows

Most of that increase is not on the grid. Bloomberg reports that the bulk would come from power plants built next to data centers to skip the wait for a grid connection, which the Sierra Club’s Jeremy Fisher said could exceed 460 million tons. Plants that do connect to the grid would add about 154 million tons, or 10%.¹

05What the headline gets right

The size of the risk is not made up. The arithmetic holds: 2.1 billion tons is about where the power sector was in 2012 to 2013, so the “15 years” comparison is fair as rough math.⁵ The headline also widens the scope: it says “greenhouse gas reductions,” but the Sierra Club figure covers carbon dioxide from power plants only, not all US emissions.¹ Other analysts also see a real danger. The Union of Concerned Scientists projected data-center power could raise power-sector emissions 19% to 29% by 2035, and Energy Innovation’s Brendan Pierpont said there is “a risk that that’s enough emissions to push us back many years of our progress.”¹ Rhodium finds that the extra demand makes emissions fall more slowly, and that in a gas-heavy future the 2035 total ends 6% to 13% higher than its baseline.³ And the Sierra Club says its estimate has grown to two to four times what it would have said a year and a half ago, which shows how fast plans are changing.¹

06What it gets wrong or leaves out

“Set to wipe out” is a promise. The source is a projection. Bloomberg’s own headline said the buildout “risks” erasing progress, and Pierpont, quoted in the same story, added that this outcome “is not a foregone conclusion.”¹

The 42% figure only happens if everything goes wrong at once. The Sierra Club counts the projects that are planned, and Bloomberg notes that many may be delayed or canceled. One example is Oracle’s New Mexico campus, which warned it may miss its 2028 date.¹ The analysis is also the highest estimate Bloomberg could find: Bloomberg says the Sierra Club’s figure “is higher than others released so far.”¹

An independent grid model disagrees on direction. Rhodium Group has power-sector emissions falling 17% to 21% below 2024 by 2030 in its baseline, and still below 2024 levels even when it assumes data center demand grows 30% faster.³ Its July outlook has emissions down 22% to 27% from 2025, because a record wave of solar, wind and batteries arrives first.⁴ Rhodium models supply bottlenecks that keep new power plants from coming online by 2030, so the two analyses differ mainly on how much new gas gets built and run.

07Where the real concern is

The risk is in the off-grid gas. Data centers that build their own plants can move faster than the grid and escape the clean-energy mix the rest of the system is moving toward. Rhodium lists the bottlenecks that make grid power slow to add: supply chain delays, turbine backlogs, jammed interconnection queues and permitting.³ That is a choice, not a law of nature: it can be shaped by permitting, by what regulators require, and by whether tech companies keep their clean-power commitments.

08What we’re not sure about

We have not seen the Sierra Club’s model. Bloomberg’s account says it uses public filings and other groups’ data center projections, and does not give the assumptions on how many projects get built, how often the gas plants run, or how fast clean power grows. Estimates in this area swing widely: Bloomberg quotes BloombergNEF saying the lowest and highest projections differ by more electricity than California and Florida use together.¹ Reading the Sierra Club paper, once public, would settle the method question. We also have not tied the 15-year figure to a specific start year; the 12 to 15 range depends on whether you count from 2010 or 2013.