For years, Silicon Valley lectured American families about ditching fossil fuels. Now, with billions on the line, those same companies are scrambling to lock in natural gas contracts that will outlast most mortgages.
Microsoft just signed a 20-year agreement with Chevron for Project Kilby, a massive natural gas power complex in Reeves County, Texas. The facility will generate roughly 2.7 gigawatts, equivalent to two large nuclear reactors, dedicated exclusively to powering a Microsoft data center. First power is expected in late 2028.
Twenty years is not a bridge fuel. It is a marriage.
Meta has gone even further. The social media giant is paying for approximately 10 new Entergy gas plants, totaling about 7.5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power a small state. The plants will feed Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which is scaling toward 5 gigawatts of computing power.
Last month, after roughly a decade of membership, Meta quit RE100, the global corporate club whose members promise 100 percent renewable electricity. The company still claims it matches its electricity use with clean and renewable energy through certificates and contracts. But matching on paper over a year is a far cry from generating reliable power at 2 a.m. on a windless Louisiana night.
The culprit behind Big Tech’s sudden conversion? Artificial intelligence.
AI runs on electricity, continuously. Billion-dollar server halls do not care whether the wind is blowing or what politicians promised. They need power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When hundreds of billions of their own dollars are at stake, these companies finally understand what too many policymakers still dodge: electricity that might show up is not the same product as electricity that shows up on demand.
Both Microsoft and Meta are also betting big on nuclear. Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to restart the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania. Meta inked a 20-year agreement for the Clinton nuclear plant in Illinois.
The companies still buy plenty of wind and solar, and that is precisely the point. AI is not proving renewables worthless. It proves they cannot generate power all the time.
Here is what should trouble every American family paying an electric bill.
About a quarter of data center capacity now under development plans to build its own generation on site, roughly 90 gigawatts across 59 tracked projects. Big Tech is not just buying reliable power. It is buying its way off a grid that its own lobbying helped make less reliable and more expensive.
Families, factories, hospitals, and farms cannot do that. Ordinary Americans are stuck with the system policy built, one that piled on weather-dependent generation while retiring coal and nuclear plants that ran on demand. Ratepayers pay for two systems and get one.
Average U.S. electricity prices have risen steadily since 2022. Utilities are asking regulators to approve billions in new plants and infrastructure for data centers. The question nobody in Washington wants to answer: who pays if that demand falls short?
For years, Microsoft pledged to match its electricity use with 100 percent renewable energy and to become carbon negative by 2030. Meta joined RE100. Silicon Valley poured billions into renewable projects and lent its political muscle to the campaign against fossil fuels.
Now those same corporations are proving with their own checkbooks what working Americans have known all along: when reliability matters, you need power that shows up on demand.
If firm, always-on electricity is worth 20-year contracts and billions in new gas and nuclear for Microsoft’s servers, the same standard should apply to American factories, hospitals, farms, and homes.
State legislators and regulators write these rules. They have the power to prioritize capacity that actually shows up, price power honestly, and stop forcing the retirement of plants communities still need.
