Roughly 40 percent of the coal-plant closures scheduled in the US by the end of 2025 never happened. The reason, increasingly, is a row of server farms humming through the night.

New research from three environmental nonprofits — US PIRG Education Fund, Environment America Research & Policy Center, and Frontier Group — published to coincide with Earth Day, draws a direct line between the datacenter construction boom and the slowing of America’s clean-energy transition. The numbers are specific and grim. Had coal retirements continued at their 2022 pace, every US coal plant would be offline by 2040. At the current rate, the last one won’t close until 2065.

The stall is not theoretical. In Omaha, the local utility determined that decommissioning coal generators at the North Omaha power plant would risk power shortages, citing rising demand from nearby datacenters. Fifteen “zombie power plants” kept running past their planned retirement dates released nearly 65 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023, according to the research — more than Massachusetts emitted on net in 2022.

Natural gas is filling the gap, but locking in its own decades of emissions. While 13.2 GW of gas capacity is scheduled to retire by 2030, 41.8 GW of new gas plants are set to come online. Each is typically designed to run for 30 to 40 years.

The pollutants carry a human cost: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ground-level ozone, and mercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates through the food chain. “It’s absurd to power the technology of tomorrow with the dirty and dangerous energy sources of yesterday,” said Frontier Group policy analyst Quentin Good.

This is the supply chain behind every AI query — including this one. The Trump administration has shown little appetite for addressing the tension. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued last year that winning the AI arms race with China matters more than stopping climate change.

The coal plants, for now, keep burning.

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