AI data centers have become a major problem for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. They need soooooo much power. Some people like to claim that they can all be powered with cheap, clean renewable energy from the sun and the wind, but the fact is, that’s not how it’s always happening — or not even how it’s usually happening. These companies are bringing in dirty, portable gas power plants; keeping old, dirty coal power plants running; and also sometimes using clean renewables. Even in the case of renewables, though, using them for new power demand could delay retiring old fossil fuel power plants — we need to cut energy demand, not grow it. And this huge AI boom and data center boom — how much is it really improving our lives? How much is it genuinely making things better? Perhaps it’s useful in some sectors, perhaps it will help create a brighter future, but a lot of it is AI slop, if not harmful in various ways. So, you can imagine that I gave a little cheer when I saw the news that half of the data centers that are supposed to go online this year in the USA are being delayed or canceled. “Last week, economist Paul Kedrosky put out an excellent piece centered around a chart that showed new data center capacity additions (as in additions to the pipeline, not brought online) halved in the fourth quarter of 2025 (per data from Wood Mackenzie),” Edward Zitron writes. “As I said above, this refers only to capacity that’s been announced rather than stuff that’s actually been brought online, and Kedrosky missed arguably the craziest chart — that of the 241GW of disclosed data center capacity, only 33% of it is actually under active development.” On the same topic, Bloomberg interviewed analysts from market intelligence company Sightline Climate as well as others and dug in on what’s going on. “It’s not just a problem for data centers planned for 2026, either. Among data centers slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction, compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts,” Futurism notes. “Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centers planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground. There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date, only 4.5 of which have actually begun work. “Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10 percent of the cost to construct one data center, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centers without them.” So, AI can’t scale as insanely rapidly as the industry wants, and seemingly expects. The good news here is that those unbuilt data centers won’t need dirty power plants generating more greenhouse gas emissions. Whether delayed or not coming at all, we will have less climate-destroying pollution going into the atmosphere.