OPINION:
For years, America’s largest technology companies were among the loudest corporate voices calling for the green energy transition.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and others made sweeping climate commitments, purchased renewable energy credits and pledged to dramatically reduce or eliminate their carbon emissions.
Then the artificial intelligence revolution began.
Suddenly, the companies promising to build the technologies of the future discovered something that energy realists have understood for decades: Modern civilization runs on enormous quantities of affordable, reliable energy.
The result has been one of the more remarkable corporate reversals of modern industry. Big Tech is rediscovering nuclear power, embracing natural gas and scrambling to secure dependable electricity wherever it can find it. This may prove good news for society.
Big Tech, big green
Major tech companies’ corporate climate commitments came on the heels of a political movement seeking to move the United States away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other politically favored energy sources.
Google announced an ambitious goal of operating entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030, while Microsoft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030 and Amazon committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Although the explosive growth of AI has forced all three to acknowledge rising emissions and refine their implementation timelines, these long-term climate targets remain central to their corporate branding.
Of course, these companies had every right to pursue these goals. The problem arose when corporate climate activism reinforced a broader political agenda that treated reliable conventional energy as something America could simply phase out, as if it were a fleeting fashion trend.
Yet electricity is different from many other services. A modern economy cannot simply wait for favorable weather before factories operate, hospitals treat patients, families heat their homes or entrepreneurs run their businesses.
Energy realists warned that affordability and reliability could not be relegated to secondary considerations in pursuit of political climate targets.
Now, some of America’s largest technology companies are learning that lesson firsthand.
Energy, the foundation of modern prosperity
Affordable, dependable energy is one of the fundamental building blocks of human prosperity. It is the master resource on which nearly everything that makes modern life comfortable, productive and safe depends.
Energy is used to grow and transport food. It heats and cools homes, provides power to factories, hospitals, schools, communication networks, transportation systems, water infrastructure and essentially every business in the country. The price of energy is embedded in the price of everything consumers buy.
When energy becomes more expensive and less reliable, society becomes poorer, families pay higher utility bills and transportation and manufacturing costs increase. Food prices rise. Energy unreliability and scarcity are like a hidden tax.
The reverse is also true. Abundant, affordable energy allows manufacturers to produce more goods at lower costs. Families can retain more of their income, entrepreneurs can build businesses that might otherwise be economically infeasible, and new industries can emerge. Entire societies become wealthier and more productive.
The history of human progress is inseparable from the history of energy consumption. Prosperous societies consume enormous amounts of energy because energy allows human beings to accomplish more with less physical labor.
For years, however, much of the political conversation reversed this relationship. Energy consumption became something to discourage. Policymakers focused on reducing demand, restricting production and managing scarcity, not striving toward abundance.
AI changed the equation
America is now a few years into an AI revolution, and the scales are shifting again. AI requires staggering amounts of computing power, and computing power requires electricity.
Companies that once talked about the need to reduce their energy footprint are now acknowledging that their electricity consumption will rise dramatically. These companies are racing to build data centers and secure the energy needed to power them.
Big Tech is financing the expansion of natural gas. In Texas, Amazon acquired an 8,000-acre site in Pecos to build a massive data center campus backed by an on-site natural gas plant capable of generating up to 7.65 gigawatts. Elon Musk acquired APR Energy — a company that operates a fleet of mobile, trailer-mounted gas and diesel generators — in a reported $1 billion deal to supply rapid off-grid power for xAI’s data centers.
Nuclear power is receiving more interest than it has in decades. Microsoft backed the planned restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 through a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy. Google entered into a landmark deal with Kairos Power to deploy 500 megawatts from advanced small modular reactors by 2035. Amazon anchored a $500 million investment in X-energy to bring more than 5 gigawatts of small modular nuclear power online by 2039.
Mr. Musk has even proposed deploying solar-powered orbital data center satellites in space to bypass terrestrial grid constraints altogether, as reported by The Associated Press.
The AI revolution has created an unusual alignment of interests. Energy producers want to build, tech companies desperately need power, states want investment and economic development, and consumers want affordable and reliable energy.
America now has an opportunity to turn that alignment into something big.
Let the AI revolution spark an American energy revolution
There are legitimate concerns about the electricity demands associated with AI data centers, but the answer to rapidly rising energy demand should be a rapidly rising energy supply.
America should build nuclear reactors, expand natural gas generation, strengthen the grid and encourage investment in whatever technologies produce abundant, reliable, affordable power.
If the AI boom ultimately leaves America with more generating capacity than it had before, the benefits will extend well beyond Big Tech. Affordable, reliable energy can strengthen American manufacturing, lower costs for families and businesses, encourage new industries and embolden entrepreneurs.
• Donald Kendal (dkendal@heartland.org) is the director of the Emerging Issues Center at The Heartland Institute. Follow @EmergingIssuesX.
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