If Stargate’s first AI data centre is completed next year as planned, the 900-acre site will need enough round-the-clock electricity to support 300,000 homes. But securing that power isn’t as simple as plugging into the grid.

Unlike arch rival Meta Platforms, which on Tuesday announced a 20-year deal to buy electricity from an Illinois nuclear plant, Stargate is relying on a technology that’s largely been relegated to the sidelines of power production: small, single cycle natural gas turbines. That’s because the AI boom – which has supercharged electricity demand – is unfolding faster than power plants can be built and new grid connections established.

The venture by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank is bridging that gap by stringing together a dozen of the small generators to power the Texas megafactory. Other city-sized data centres, including Elon Musk’s xAI and Alphastruxure, a joint venture between Carlyle and Schneider Electric, are doing the same.

The trend has sparked an unlikely comeback for a type of gas turbine that long ago fell out of favor for being inefficient and polluting. It also lays bare a critical disconnect between the growth of AI and the state of the US power sector. The next three years are key to the expansion of AI computing, and technology companies that had pledged to go green are racing to erect the city-sized data centres that will fuel it. At the same time, aging power infrastructure means there’s a years-long wait to connect and tap power from electric grids. And nuclear — now in huge demand from tech giants — is unlikely to provide much new power anytime soon.