In the first six months of this year, the volume of gas-fired power projects under construction in the United States rose by 76 percent. That single figure, drawn from a new report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), is enough to overturn a long-held assumption about which country leads the world in fossil-fuel expansion. For years, China's breakneck economic growth meant that it consistently outpaced the US in new gas generation. That is no longer the case.

The US is now building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China — and more than any other nation on Earth. The driving force behind this reversal is artificial intelligence. Roughly half of all the new capacity currently in development is directly linked to datacenters being built to handle AI workloads, which require extraordinary quantities of electricity. Since January, total gas capacity in development in the US has climbed from 252 gigawatts to 378 gigawatts — a third of the entire global pipeline.

If every announced project is eventually completed, the country's gas fleet will grow by approximately two-thirds, at a capital cost that GEM estimates at more than $647 billion. One analysis suggests that powering this datacenter boom with gas rather than renewables could raise US electricity-sector emissions by as much as 20 percent. The political backdrop makes the numbers more striking still. The Trump administration has repeatedly argued that China's emissions growth makes American climate action pointless.