'ENERGY MATTERS': CEO on 'critical role' natural gas plays in AI data centers

Our Take

When the head of one of the country's biggest natural gas pipeline operators goes on Fox Business to call the AI data center boom a 'golden age' for energy, that's not a forecast — it's a sales pitch. Chad Zamarin's job is to move more gas through more pipe, and hyperscalers begging for firm, always-on power are the best customer his industry has seen in decades. Nothing wrong with saying so out loud. But 'critical role' is doing a lot of work in that headline, and it conveniently skips the part where new gas plants and pipeline laterals built to serve a single data center campus often get folded into regulated utility rate bases — meaning everyday customers help finance the infrastructure whether or not they ever touch a GPU.

This is the pattern we track every day at GridWatch: utilities and gas suppliers framing the AI buildout as an unambiguous boom, while the actual contracts — who pays for the new turbines, who eats the emissions, whose water gets used for cooling those gas plants too — stay buried in filings most ratepayers never see. 'Golden age' for whom is the real question, and it's rarely the household next door to the substation.

If you want to see where this is actually playing out, check our facility map for the gas plants and data centers going up near you, and use our take-action page to find out how to weigh in before the deal is already signed.