Two Fossil Fuel Companies Are Betting Big on Data Centers

It’s been a banner year for oil and gas companies. Some of the world’s biggest oil giants have announced billions of dollars in quarterly profits over the past two weeks, boosted largely by the soaring price of oil thanks to the conflict in the Middle East.

But the artificial intelligence boom is also giving fossil fuel companies a new industry to sell their gas, pipelines, and power plants to: data centers. Two American oil and gas companies, Williams and Chevron, are presenting that demand to investors as a huge win.

Data centers are becoming “a big driver for both power and gas demand in the US,” says Ashish Sethia, the global head of commodities and energy at BloombergNEF. The group published a report last week that found that increased demand for natural gas by the mid-2030s, driven partly by data centers, means that the US would need to...

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