Of the Magnificent Seven U.S. IT companies, Google (owned by Alphabet) was, until recently, the most committed to averting carbon pollution and forecast the achievement of neutral responsibility by year 2030.

In October, 2025 it announced that it had contracted to buy natural gas from a plant in Illinois to supply the campus of a projected data centre. In February this year, the Flatwater Free Press published documents obtained by investigative journalists which purported to show that Google had also negotiated a contract to obtain gas from a large new source in Nebraska.

Last month, the research organization Cleanview showed satellite images of a 933 MW gas fired power plant which is already being constructed by Crusoe Energy on the Goodnight data centre campus in the Armstrong county of Texas. Their planning application estimated that, at full power, the plant will emit annually 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide which is roughly equivalent to that of the entire city of San Franisco.

Google will not say at this stage how much electricity it will need to buy from this off-grid source but its own licence application shows that at least two of the huge buildings will be supplied by Crusoe.

With the meteoric rise of the global artificial intelligence industry, the necessity for colossal and highly complex data centres is growing phenomenally. To make the new systems function with a speed far superior to machines of the internet era, trillions of calculations using a far greater number of computer chips are required. This means that the present national grid systems are woefully inadequate to meet the new demand for electricity. The tech companies are thus being forced to either sign contracts with private energy sources or to build their own power plants for campuses. These are then on course to become sovereign enclaves with their own security and administration.

Meta, Amazon and Microsoft too are all moving towards a partial revision of their net-zero goals by turning to natural gas for power. For example, Microsoft has contracted with Chevron to build a 2.5 GW plant in west Texas. With the exhortations of the U.S. government to “drill, baby drill” it is not improbable that fossil fuels will be used also to meet the ever-increasing demands of the cyber-world for energy.

The ongoing mega-project at Sines has attracted much attention because of its huge potential demand for electricity and water. The developer of the site is Startcampus but Microsoft has contracted an investment of €8.6 billion to ”build out AI and Cloud infrastructure”. With the inflation in costs for both machinery and construction, this may well prove to be an underestimate which may need to be supplemented if it is found necessary to build an on-site power plant to exclusively supply the campus outside of the national grid.

In Portugal, Altice presently leads the IT industry with an operational centre in Covilhã and regional sub-stations. Here, too, there will soon be a need for additional power but the requirements of mining, industry, agriculture, tourism and the local populace are also increasing rapidly. Doubt is growing as to the ability (and desirability) of solar and wind “farms” to supply the excess.

The Kristin storm brought into sharp focus how antiquated is the grid which was inherited from the 20th century environment. It needs billions of Euros for building new powerplants and lines for distribution if all of the new demands are to be sustained. If this is to be financed by government, much higher unit prices will be demanded from the Portuguese taxpayer with little prospect of participation in the profits expected by the magnificent seven.

The alternatives appear to be to either creating separate tarriffs for residential, commercial and industrial property or to allow private equity funds to invest in the building of plants to supply energy to the new cyber-cities.

An essay by Roberto Cavaleiro Tomar 08 April 2026