In mid-October, North America's computing power and energy markets threw up a tight cluster of signals all pointing the same way.

On October 15, Venture Global signed a framework agreement for up to 16 islanded 720MW generation sets, intended to support as much as 10GW of future computing power capacity. The same day, PowerHouse and Big Watt won approval in Taylor, Texas, for a data center campus of up to 1GW, paired with a 750MW natural gas plant.

A day earlier, on October 14, AEP said it would invest $4 billion in a 702MW fuel cell power station and signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Google.

Equipment makers are moving too. On October 13, energy infrastructure services provider Enerflex said it had won an order for more than 1GW of behind-the-meter natural gas generation equipment for a large North American data center, covering design, engineering, manufacturing and assembly. That pushed its behind-the-meter gas generation backlog past 1.75GW, including the roughly 450MW order announced on October 1, with delivery slots now booked out to 2028.

Operators are going further. Bloomberg reported the same day that pipeline construction and grid interconnection delays have left Oracle trucking in compressed natural gas (CNG) to keep its Salt Lake City, Utah data center running for more than a year, and using the same approach to supply a campus under construction in Shackelford County, Texas, co-developed with OpenAI. Oracle is now considering repeating the arrangement at its 2.5GW "Project Jupiter" campus in New Mexico, where pipeline permitting has stalled, in a bid to get early computing power online before the pipeline is finished.

On one side, gigawatt-scale gas generation equipment orders are queued three years out. On the other, hyperscalers are resorting to tanker trucks on public highways to hit delivery dates. IDCNOVA's tracking from late August to mid-October 2026 shows that with grid interconnection queues routinely running five to ten years, natural gas has shifted from a transitional backup option to the core baseload power source behind the near-term buildout of overseas AI computing centers.

The footprint is widening as well. From core US states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia and Louisiana, to Canada's Saskatchewan, gas fields in Russian Siberia, and even power-constrained Ireland, a supply chain contest is accelerating around gas turbines, reciprocating engines, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), lateral pipelines, wellhead shale gas and utility gas-fired peaking.

Equipment Orders Booked Out to 2028 Within a Week

Looking back over the six-plus weeks from late August to mid-October 2026, natural gas power news in the data center sector landed almost weekly, and it stretched from single-campus captive generation to the full chain: upstream gas fields, midstream pipelines, equipment manufacturing and utility peaking capacity.

By mid-October, beyond Enerflex's 1GW-plus equipment order and Oracle's CNG trucking, Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia and Wyoming all saw a concentrated run of project and policy disclosures between October 9 and 11.

Texas is the telling case. On September 21, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to suspend all new data center environmental permits until the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) completes a large-scale grid interconnection audit by December. Developers are still pushing projects forward along other routes.

A $366 million "Project Longhorn - Building One" in Cedar Creek, Bastrop County, has been filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, with construction slated to begin November 30, 2026 and finish in late January 2028. The campus is to include a 2,842-acre generation facility using simple-cycle gas turbines to provide 710MW of site-rated redundant power, supporting 490MW of IT capacity. AI lab Anthropic is reportedly in talks to lease it. Bastrop County also hosts the large campuses EdgeConneX is building for customers including CoreWeave, and participant Pacifico Energy earlier this year secured a TCEQ-issued 7.65GW air permit for the 5GW GW Ranch project in West Texas.

In the El Paso border region of West Texas, next to New Mexico, self-supply models are diverging. Meta plans a 366MW modular gas generation facility at a campus about 25 miles west of El Paso. The 350MW Hueco Ranch geodesic dome campus in the same area, which broke ground on October 7 at a cost of $15 billion on idle oil, gas and ranch land and connects to the WECC grid rather than ERCOT, skips gas turbines and their heavier permitting load in favor of behind-the-meter geothermal and solar.

Midwest and eastern US utility markets are filing projects at pace too.

Disclosed on October 9: Wisconsin utility We Energies has filed an engineering plan with state regulators to build Fox North Energy Center, a 750MW combined-cycle gas plant, on the site of an existing gas plant in the Village of Wrightstown. It is the seventh new gas plant proposal in the state in roughly two years. Parent WEC Energy Group has already won approval to develop two gas plants, a gas storage facility and a 33-mile gas pipeline, and We Energies plans to spend more than $2 billion acquiring Chicago developer Invenergy's proposed gas generation projects in Kenosha and Walworth counties, totaling about 1,500MW. Invenergy separately plans two gas plants in Calumet County totaling 1,900MW.

The same day, Michigan utility DTE Energy said it is in "advanced negotiations" with data center developers representing 2GW of demand, with potential follow-on demand of 3GW to 4GW, and has proposed spending $6.4 billion in its new long-term plan to build two gas plants replacing retiring coal capacity.

On the PJM grid, which covers 13 eastern states and Washington, DC, PJM used its Expedited Interconnection Track (EIT) to fast-track an upgrade of the existing Hunterstown 500kV natural gas facility in Adams County, Pennsylvania, adding 455MW of nameplate capacity, alongside two large battery storage projects.

In the global data center hub of Northern Virginia, T5 Data Centers has applied to Fairfax County for a special permit to build "Project Charlie" in Chantilly, the county's first data center powered by natural gas fuel cells, at 312,000 square feet. Washington Gas would supply the site via a pipeline extension, driving roughly 48MW of natural gas fuel cells for baseload power, with Dominion Energy's grid covering only the remaining 27MW at most.

Behind-the-Meter Gas Turbines: Building the Power Plant Inside the Campus

The industry talks about "natural gas power" as one thing, but in practice developers, cloud giants and utilities have split into four distinct technology and interconnection paths.

The first is behind-the-meter (BTM) captive generation using large and mid-sized gas turbines, either simple-cycle (SCGT) or combined-cycle (CCGT), aimed at hyperscale AI campuses in the hundreds of megawatts to gigawatt range.

The logic is simple. The conventional grid cannot deliver hundreds of megawatts at a single node in the near term, so developers build their own gas turbine clusters next to high-pressure gas trunk lines, former coal plants, or large industrial parks.

Beyond the Texas "Project Longhorn" described above (710MW supporting 490MW of IT) and Meta's El Paso campus (366MW of modular gas generation), several other projects illustrate the pattern.

Aligned's 2GW "Project Phoenix" in Shippingport, Pennsylvania sits directly next to a natural gas energy park converted from a former coal plant, allowing both behind-the-meter self-supply and the export of surplus power back to the PJM grid. TECfusions' campus in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, planned to reach 3GW long term, is already running live GPU compute off gas turbines and is building a long-term microgrid around two existing gas well pads and a gas dehydration unit. In the Texas Panhandle, Fermi's "Project Matador" takes behind-the-meter gas to its limit, planning to fold the largest combined-cycle natural gas generation project in the US into a 17GW private grid.

Other projects following the campus-plus-gas-plant model include Bell AI Fabric in Saskatchewan, Canada (adding up to 900MW in phases on the way to a 1.2GW hub), Altigen Energy's "Jurassic Spark" in Carbon County, Utah (250MW initially, 3GW long term), Arevia Power's Rhea project on federal land in Idaho, and a million-square-foot project in Forward Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania.

Reciprocating Engines and Wellhead Supply: Putting Computing Power on the Gas Field

The second path is behind-the-meter reciprocating gas engines (gas piston units), often combined with direct supply from gas fields or shale gas wellheads, offering fast modular deployment, bridge power and a fuel cost advantage.

In smaller and phased buildouts, Kodiak Gas Services is deploying roughly 40 natural gas reciprocating gensets for a West Texas data center, providing 76MW of behind-the-meter baseload power, with only weeks between signing and the start of deployment in the fourth quarter of 2026. In Michigan, Hyperscale Data's plan to expand a 30MW campus to 340MW includes 40MW of behind-the-meter gas generation. At the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Nevada, where interconnection queues are especially severe, Fleet Data Centers has applied to build two methane gas plants totaling 360MW, explicitly framed as "bridge power" for two to three years until utility NV Energy completes permanent grid interconnection.

More disruptive still is wellhead supply, which puts computing power directly on the gas field.

Alpha Compute acquired roughly 1,800 net acres of unleased Marcellus shale gas mineral rights in Tioga County, northern Pennsylvania, using its own subsurface gas to generate continuous behind-the-meter power for a 200MW campus, rising to 1GW long term. Third-party analysis puts the model's all-in delivered cost at about $0.0585 per kilowatt-hour over a 10-year horizon, well below the $0.08 to $0.10 per kilowatt-hour commercial and industrial rates currently seen on the PJM grid.

Another example comes from Russia. After Moscow and surrounding areas banned bitcoin mining, Gazprom and Crypto Energy teamed up in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Western Siberia, tapping residual low-pressure gas at the depleted Medvezhye field, where reservoir pressure is too low for long-distance transport, to run gas piston power plants on site and supply modular data centers. Marginal field tail gas becomes low-cost energy for computing power.

Fuel Cells: No Combustion, So Permits Clear

The third path is non-combustion electrochemistry. Utility-scale natural gas fuel cells, including solid oxide designs, are becoming the tool of choice for clearing permitting hurdles at data centers near cities and in regions with strict environmental standards.

Conventional gas turbines and internal combustion engines generate power by burning fuel, which draws tough environmental reviews over nitrogen oxide emissions, noise and water use. Fuel cells convert natural gas directly into electricity through a closed electrochemical reaction, with no conventional combustion and no need for an on-site substation, sharply cutting local air pollution and bringing water use close to zero.

That is the appeal behind Oracle's decision to expand its agreement with Bloom Energy to as much as 2.8GW, including the 1.2GW already contracted, and to replace the originally planned 2.2GW of gas turbines and diesel generators at its 2.5GW Project Jupiter campus in New Mexico entirely with Bloom solid oxide fuel cells.

In the tightly regulated Northern Virginia corridor, T5 Data Centers' "Project Charlie" in Chantilly likewise leans on roughly 48MW of natural gas fuel cells for baseload power, with up to 27MW of grid supply from Dominion Energy. That removes the need for an on-site substation and greatly reduces reliance on emergency diesel generators.

At a former mining site redevelopment in Newport Township, Pennsylvania, Fit Energy is working with FuelCell Energy to deploy combustion-free natural gas fuel cells, winning zoning approval from the local community and municipal authorities on the strength of low noise and low emissions.

The Utility-Side Gas Wave and Hybrid Architectures

The fourth path is front-of-the-meter construction or expansion of large gas plants, plus hybrid architectures that pair grid interconnection with behind-the-meter microgrids.

Faced with data center load requests running into multiple gigawatts, traditional utilities are launching a new wave of gas baseload investment. A report from the US Environment America Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group found that proposed natural gas plants nationwide have nearly tripled since the start of 2023, with a 44% jump in the past eight months alone.

Specific cases: ONE Nuclear's "Project Cayman" in Ascension Parish, Louisiana plans a gas plant of up to 2.88GW with 700MW/2.88GWh of storage, coordinated directly with Entergy's regional transmission expansion and a co-located data center campus. In Wisconsin, We Energies has filed for the 750MW combined-cycle Fox North plant and plans to spend more than $2 billion acquiring roughly 1,500MW of Invenergy gas projects. In Michigan, DTE Energy plans $6.4 billion for two new gas plants to serve gigawatt-scale data center load and replace retiring coal. And PJM is using its EIT fast track to advance 455MW of new gas capacity at Pennsylvania's Hunterstown plant.

More novel is the package Black Hills tailored for Google in Cheyenne, Wyoming: 590MW of grid service, including $1.8 billion for 564MW of new company-owned gas capacity, plus a 2.1GW private microgrid dispatching third-party gas turbine and fuel cell resources. It fuses a utility's grid dispatch capability with the flexibility of distributed behind-the-meter gas.

The Other Side of Gigawatt-Scale Capital Intensity

Developing gigawatt-scale gas plants in lockstep with data center campuses means capital commitments running from billions into the tens of billions of dollars. If compute tenant demand shifts, or pipeline and environmental approvals stall, the result can easily be enormous stranded assets. It is worth watching closely.

Seen from a wider industry vantage point, the rush for gas among North American and European data centers is essentially a head-on collision between the speed AI computing power demands and the physical and regulatory rigidity of power and gas infrastructure. As gigawatt-scale gas projects pile up in filings across regions, the regulatory fight over grid security, gas supply reliability, rate fairness and carbon emissions has escalated across the board.