Reuters has counted at least 57 off-grid power plants, proposed or under construction across the United States, that together would generate roughly 73,000 megawatts to feed AI data centers, often approved in weeks with no public hearings. Reuters' investigation, published June 16, 2026, found more than a dozen of these plants cleared in under a year, several through state laws that let developers skip the environmental studies and community review that normally attach to a generating station of this size. The plants serve a single customer behind the meter, and developers argue that private, off-grid status exempts them from much of the standard process.
The flagship example is the Apollo Generating Station in Wood County, Ohio, about 25 miles south of Toledo. Will Power LLC, a Williams Cos. subsidiary, is building it to serve a Meta data center routed through a shell entity called Liames LLC, with capacity equivalent to powering 100,000 homes and an approval that took under three months. Ohio law let plants like it clear in as little as 45 days without hearings, and draft air permits stayed out of public view until after construction began. Outside Memphis, the xAI campus is already running gas turbines, with more than 500 MW deployed, under a temporary off-grid claim. Meta ran its Bowling Green site under the codename Project Accordion for nearly two years.
Almost all of these plants burn natural gas, which emits nitrogen oxides and fine particulate alongside greenhouse gases. The fuel choice matters to cooling because on-site generation collapses the distance between the heat source and the heat sink. A campus that owns its 300 MW or 2 GW of gas capacity is sizing thermal architecture against a fixed, self-imposed power envelope rather than a grid allocation that can be negotiated upward later. That pushes operators toward direct-to-chip liquid cooling and higher rack densities to extract maximum compute per watt of self-generated power, the same calculus we traced in the water-power tradeoff operators keep getting wrong.
Off-grid gas also reshapes the water question. A plant approved in 45 days behind an NDA has not been through the public hearings where evaporative cooling draw normally gets contested, and combined-cycle gas turbines themselves consume water for steam and turbine cooling on top of whatever the data center hall demands. Stacking a private generating station next to a data center concentrates two large thermal loads on one parcel, often in counties that never reviewed the aggregate water budget. That opacity is exactly what feeds the local backlash documented in our coverage of offsite water consumption at data centers.
The speed is the strategic signal. When a developer can stand up 300 MW of Wartsila gas engines or 2 GW of Caterpillar gensets in a matter of months, the cooling system has to be procured and commissioned on the same compressed timeline. That favors pre-engineered liquid cooling skids, factory-integrated coolant distribution units, and closed-loop designs that reduce permitting friction by minimizing external water draw. The grid constraints driving this entire off-grid migration are the same ones we examined in power grid constraints on data center development, and the cooling industry's order book now moves in lockstep with how fast private gas gets approved. Heat rejection is no longer the gating item. Air permits are, and the campuses winning the race are the ones that made both the power and the cooling invisible to the public until the concrete was already poured.