Amazon's new Texas gas plant can emit 33M tons of CO2—more than any US coal plant

Amazon is bankrolling a natural gas power plant in West Texas so massive that its pollution permit allows it to spew more CO2 than the country’s dirtiest coal plant. The GW Ranch facility in Pecos County won’t even connect to the state grid — all 7.65 gigawatts from its 35 turbines feed directly into a new Amazon data center.

A permit from Texas regulators authorizes the site to emit up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. For context, that ceiling exceeds what any single coal-fired plant in the U.S. is legally allowed to release. Plants rarely max out their permits, but the sheer headroom here is revealing: Texas placed almost no meaningful constraint on the project. Amazon confirmed it purchased the site and intends to buy the power.

The move fits an industry-wide pattern. Meta, Google, and others are building their own fossil-fuel plants as AI’s electricity appetite outpaces what renewables can supply. The Trump administration has been cheerleading this reversal by stripping away pollution restrictions. What was once a race to net-zero has become a scramble for 24/7 baseload power, and gas is the fastest way to get it.

Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, offered a telling acknowledgment to the New York Times: “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.” She insists the net-zero-by-2040 commitment still stands. But Amazon’s emissions have already risen for several consecutive years. A single facility permitted to emit tens of millions of tons of CO2 makes that pledge look less like a plan and more like a prayer. The original Climate Pledge, co-founded with Global Optimism in 2019, was designed for a pre-generative-AI era — and the tension between those two timelines is now written into the Texas dirt.