US gas plants planned solely for data centres pass 189 gigawatts
Global Energy Monitor now counts 189 gigawatts of US data centre gas plants, up from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025. Intel's Hot Chips 2026 lineup splits agentic work across a Xeon, an inference GPU and a laptop chip.
Artificial Intelligence··Midday
The US data-centre gas queue passes 189 gigawatts
The pipeline of gas-fired capacity being developed solely for US data centres has passed 189 gigawatts, according to Global Energy Monitor's update released Tuesday, up from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025. On projects in development, the US has again overtaken China. The same group tracked 4 gigawatts of such projects in early 2024. Analyst Jenny Martos says not all of the plants in the queue are certain to be completed, listing financing, local opposition, moratoriums and turbine supply as constraints.[1]
Behind-the-meter plants skip the grid queue
Many of the plants are behind-the-meter private facilities put up to skip long grid-connection queues, and WIRED reports that some are permitted with inefficient turbines that raise emissions. Jenny Martos lists financing, local opposition, moratoriums and turbine supply as the constraints on how much of the 189 gigawatt queue counted by Global Energy Monitor on Tuesday is completed.[1]
Intel splits agentic work across three chips
For Hot Chips 2026, Intel set out three parts it says carry agentic workloads from the rack to the edge: the Diamond Rapids Xeon, the Crescent Island inference GPU, and Wildcat Lake, shipping as Intel Core Series 3. No pricing, availability date or independent benchmark came with the disclosure. Diamond Rapids is built on the Intel 18A-P process and uses Foveros Direct 3D stacking with a UCIe-S interconnect. Crescent Island is pitched as a low-power, air-cooled inference part meant to hold larger models and longer context windows inside existing data-centre footprints. Wildcat Lake, on Intel 18A, pairs Xe3 graphics with a neural engine the company rates at up to 17 TOPS and is the first Intel processor to use UCIe. Every figure here is Intel's own; chief technology officer Pushkar Ranade framed the set as tightly integrating general-purpose compute with purpose-built acceleration.[2]
