Senate permitting bill would be a gift to data centers and their massive gas buildout

Senators announced a bipartisan bill to deregulate federal infrastructure permitting. Some Democrats framed the deal as good for clean energy, citing provisions that could speed up permitting for transmission lines and grid connections for renewable energy. But the bill would more likely support an unprecedented buildout of gas power plants linked to the AI data center boom.

In short:

Data centers are fueling a massive buildout of gas-fired power plants and associated pipeline expansions across the country.
The Senate permitting bill would weaken accountability for that buildout. Restrictions on environmental challenges would give developers more power at communities’ expense.
Congress should reject the bill. Lawmakers should accelerate clean energy while preserving environmental safeguards, tribal sovereignty, and communities’ access to the courts.

This bill has a lot wrong with it. It would gut bedrock laws that protect Tribal sovereignty, environmental justice, clean water, and endangered species, among other things. Some of the bill’s supporters seem to believe that sacrificing these things is a price worth paying for renewable energy. While that is clearly misguided, it also ignores the reality of energy development in the U.S. today.

Look at the map below. It shows planned data centers against a backdrop of the U.S. gas pipeline network. The largest expansion of electricity generation this country has possibly ever seen is not being planned with wind and solar power. It’s being planned with gas. The tech giants, awash with money and intent on building out AI infrastructure as fast as possible and at any cost, have announced plans for power plants that could increase gas consumption in the U.S. power sector by over 40%.

Part of their strategy is to bypass federal permitting altogether by building in the gas basins themselves (indicated by the red circles on the map above), so they can access gas not only where it’s cheapest, but where they won’t need interstate pipelines that require federal permitting. This bill does nothing to curb this immense resource grab. But that is only part of the story.

Building behind the fence, or off the grid, means the data centers will not be subject to the transmission cost reforms proposed in the bill, which are intended to ensure data centers pay the full cost of the transmission line upgrades they require. But if interstate gas pipelines are needed to bring the massive increases in gas consumption that these facilities will require, they will benefit from the bill provisions that gut environmental and community protections.

Take, for example, the planned Desert Southwest Expansion project, a $5 billion, 520-mile, 48-inch gas pipeline proposed to run from Texas through New Mexico to Arizona, where several large data centers are planned. The project is meeting resistance along its route. This bill would take away communities’ ability to participate in the permitting process, including the crucial Clean Water Act 401 permit that states use to protect their water resources, a vital issue in the arid Southwest, and to challenge the project in court. It will all but ensure that another 2.3 billion cubic feet per day of gas, an amount similar to the entire gas consumption of the Netherlands, will be extracted from the Permian Basin and burned to generate power for AI.

Across the country, pipeline developers are planning expansions to supply gas to new data centers. Some of these projects will cross state lines and require federal certificates and permits, which this bill will only make easier and faster by removing states’ ability to protect their water resources, land, and communities.

If the current slate of data centers and associated gas power plants goes ahead, data center gas demand will rise by over 15 billion cubic feet per day by 2035, according to an analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This is more than 40% of the power sector’s gas consumption in 2025 and equals Central and South America’s total gas consumption in that year.

The bill comes as renewable energy faces unprecedented attacks. In the first 10 months of 2025 alone, the Trump administration took 23 actions targeting wind and solar energy. And these attacks continue. This is not the time to eliminate the mechanisms that enable community resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure. Renewable energy will not surge ahead with Trump in the White House and oil executives running the Department of Energy. The fossil fuel industry’s grip on this country’s energy system and politics will only be harder to diminish.

Resistance to data centers is happening everywhere across the country, crossing political divides and uniting people against the AI industry’s grab for land, water, and energy. But data centers are just one part of the story. The gas industry is hiding behind every one of these projects. As the climate crisis deepens every day, we need more tools to fight, not fewer.