A Joint Statement from Neuralwatt & GreenPT

Last week, the New York Times reported that at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or proposed to power American data centers, most of them permitted in the last 18 months. One of them, outside El Paso, will emit as much carbon in a year as 360,000 cars.  

The people breathing those emissions are rarely the ones building with the AI those plants power. Pollution and climate emergencies have never been distributed evenly, and the costs will largely land in rural counties and border towns where the air is already worse and the power to object is always thinner.

To be clear, Neuralwatt and GreenPT are not against AI buildout. We are two companies whose entire work depends on AI succeeding. But this expansion is being built the reflexive way, not the deliberate way. There is tremendous potential for AI to benefit humanity, and it is being undermined by the short-term rush to claim it first.  

AI runs far less efficiently than it could. Peer-reviewed research in Joule found optimized inference systems already use 4–20× less energy per query than widely cited estimates, and that further improvements across model design, serving systems, and hardware could reduce per-query energy use by 8–20×. These plants are being sized to projected demand that includes enormous inefficiency, which means communities will breathe emissions for power that could have been avoided.

Gas turbines are the default because they're fast to deploy, not because they're the best option. On-site gas is usually more expensive than grid power, and build costs have risen 66% since 2023. These plants lock in decades of emissions for what's framed as a short-term bridge, but no one says where the bridge ends. Meanwhile, solar and wind with battery storage, small modular reactors, geothermal, and fuel cells are all already powering data centers. The choice isn't between gas and nothing.

So here's our ask: Reverse the order. Instead of building power first and thinking about efficiency second, cut the waste and make AI leaner, then build for the remaining demand.

It's a sequence that costs nothing to follow. It's cheaper for the companies building AI. It's cleaner for the towns hosting it. And it leaves more power on the grid for everyone else.

If you believe AI should be built responsibly, share this. The decisions being made in the next eighteen months will outlive every model we’re excited about today, and the communities carrying their cost deserve proof that the capacity was necessary.

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Robert Keus, Co-founder/CEO, GreenPT

Cas Burggraaf, Co-founder/CTO, GreenPT

Chad Gibson, Co-founder/CEO, Neuralwatt

Scott Chamberlin, Co-founder/CTO, Neuralwatt