Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft spent years buying wind and solar. This year they are also pouring concrete around natural-gas plants to feed AI data centers. TechCrunch reports energy research firm Noreva thinks they may regret the gas bet. The firm’s forecast: gas prices could triple in some parts of the United States as hyperscaler demand hits slower supply growth and rising LNG exports.
Noreva CEO Peter Gardett told TechCrunch that energy markets got used to the idea that gas cannot go up. Simple arithmetic, he argues, now points to a tighter market. The build list is already huge. Meta announced a 7.5-gigawatt gas plant in Louisiana for its Hyperion campus. Microsoft and Google each unveiled gigawatt-scale gas plants in Texas. Amazon has a 7.6-gigawatt gas plan of its own. These are not rooftop generators. They are utility-scale bets by companies that historically avoided owning the power stack.
If Noreva is even half right, the next AI cost crisis is not only GPUs — it is the fuel bill behind the rack. If the firm is wrong, hyperscalers locked cheap dispatchable power while everyone else waited on interconnect queues. Either way, “the cloud” is becoming an energy company with a chat window. Watch the power contracts as closely as the model cards.
