Amazon Web Services plans to build a vast data centre for artificial intelligence which, because of its energy demands, could become the single largest source of carbon dioxide in the United States. Not one of the largest. The largest.

The company confirmed an investment in a new gas-fired power plant that will supply the centre in Pecos County, Texas. The facility is expected to have a capacity of up to 7.65 gigawatts, and its 35 turbines could according to estimates emit 33 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

So the number does not stay abstract: that is comparable to the total annual emissions of countries such as Switzerland, Ireland or Bulgaria. One data centre, with its own power plant next to it, carrying the footprint of an entire European state.

The promise and the accounting

The plan directly contradicts Amazon's publicly stated goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2040. That is not our interpretation - the company is aware of the discrepancy.

The answer from spokesperson Margaret Callahan is a sentence worth keeping: "The world today looks different than it did when we co-founded the climate pledge." So the pledge applied to the former world. The new world changed the conditions, and the deadlines somehow stayed the same on paper.

The trend is clear even without Texas. Last year Amazon recorded a record rise in total emissions, and company-wide electricity consumption during 2025 grew by 34 percent. Every year a new record in pollution, and every year the same promise for 2040.

This is a story worth remembering every time artificial intelligence is presented as something existing in a cloud, clean and weightless. It does not exist in a cloud. It exists in Pecos County, with 35 turbines and chimneys.

And promises with a fifteen-year deadline have one convenient quality - whoever made them rarely holds the job when the time comes to check.