A new buyer shows up
US natural gas traded near $2.84 per million British thermal units on Wednesday, up more than 5% on the day as forecasts for late-summer heat lifted demand for air conditioning. Those daily swings still track weather and storage. The bigger shift is slower and harder to spot on a price chart: artificial intelligence is turning data centers into one of the fastest-growing buyers of American gas.
For years, gas demand grew in a fairly predictable way, split between home heating, industry, power plants and a booming export business in liquefied natural gas. Data centers barely registered. That is changing fast.
What the forecasts say
S&P Global Commodity Insights expects data centers to add somewhere between 3 and 6 billion cubic feet of daily gas demand by 2030. A year or two ago that number sat close to zero. RBC Capital Markets lands near the top of that range, around 6.1 billion cubic feet a day. East Daley Analytics sees a range of 4.2 to 6.1 billion cubic feet, and counts about 290 planned projects that together would call for roughly 81 gigawatts of new gas-fired generation.
To put 6 billion cubic feet a day in perspective, total US gas demand runs near 118 billion cubic feet a day this summer. Data centers alone could add close to 5% on top of everything the country already burns, a jump that would normally take years of steady economic growth to produce.
Planned gas-fired capacity earmarked for data centers has ballooned in barely a year. The American Action Forum, citing industry tracking, put it near 24 gigawatts in early 2025 and roughly 64 gigawatts a year later. Gas made up about 11% of planned data center capacity in 2024 and close to 18% by 2026, while fossil-fueled additions in the planning pipeline rose about 71% over roughly the same window.
Why gas, and why now
The appeal comes down to speed and reliability. AI training clusters run around the clock and cannot tolerate flickers, so operators want power they control. Hooking a large new site up to the public grid can take several years, since interconnection queues have stretched out across much of the country. Build a gas plant right on the site, behind the meter, and it can be running in about a year and a half.
That timing gap is why so many operators are skipping the wait. Tech companies want capacity now, not at the end of the decade, and gas turbines are the quickest heavy-duty option on the shelf.
None of this comes cheap. The price of building a gas-fired plant has climbed about 66% in the past year, with turbine orders stacking up faster than makers can fill them, and data center demand is a big part of that squeeze. Some communities are pushing back, worried that the rush is lifting their electricity bills, a concern increasingly aimed at data center growth.
The market picture
For gas producers, this is the demand story they have waited for. The last decade of US gas growth leaned heavily on LNG exports, which now run near 17 billion cubic feet a day and remain the single biggest driver of new demand. Data centers offer a second engine, and one rooted at home rather than shipped overseas. Domestic prices are already quick to react to any tightening, as Europe's scramble for winter gas supply has shown.
The catch is that these projections are not guaranteed. They depend on turbines arriving on schedule, pipelines reaching the right places and the AI buildout holding up. If the boom cools, some of that planned capacity may never get built. If it holds, gas could gain a durable new source of demand that reshapes the market well past 2030.
For now, the daily price still answers to heat and storage levels. But the longer arc of US gas is being drawn in server halls, not just on weather maps.