Reuters
A spike in electricity demand from the world's big data providers is raising a worrying possibility for the world's climate: a near-term surge in fossil-fuel use. Utilities, power regulators and researchers in a half-dozen countries told Reuters the surprising growth in power demand driven by the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing is being met in the near-term by fossil fuels like natural gas, and even coal, because the pace of clean-energy deployments is moving too slowly to keep up. In the United States, home to a third of world data centers, utilities are adding new gas plants and delaying the retirements of fossil-fuel power plants as a slew of sprawling new data centers plug in to the grid.