Microsoft just announced that it will deploy 1.35 GW of Nvidia's chips at an off-grid data center in West Virginia that will run on 100% natural gas. This single deployment could boost the company's data center emissions by 40% based on my estimates. In Cleanview's latest report, we identified ~50 data center developers that were planning to build their own power plants. One of the strangest ones we came across was Monarch Compute Campus, an 8 GW project in West Virginia. The company behind the project had never built a data center and had no tenant disclosed. Yet we found a 2 GW order for Caterpillar gensets to power the first phase. I didn't know what to make of it. Yesterday, Nscale—a neocloud backed by Nvidia—announced it has acquired the Monarch project and signed a deal with Microsoft to deploy 1.35 GW of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs. Nscale says it plans to bring the first 2 GW of its project online by 2028. It wants to build 8 GW of capacity by 2031. Before working on our behind-the-meter data center report, I would have been skeptical of this timeline. But in that research, we learned that developers are getting around grid delays and turbine shortages by purchasing equipment like the Caterpillar gensets Monarch will use. It's difficult to overstate the scale of this project. 8 GW is a bit less than the entire peak power demand of New York City. That scale will come with major environmental impacts. Microsoft's 1.35 GW deployment could result in 3.9 million tons of CO2 emissions per year by my estimate. Last year, the company's entire fleet of data centers emitted about 10 million tons. So this deployment would boost emissions by 40%. If the project scales to 8 GW, it could emit 23 million tons per year. That would represent about 35% of the entire coal-heavy state's emissions. In our report, we found 45 more data center projects like this that would add a combined 56 GW of capacity. We wrote a lot more on this trend in the full report on behind-the-meter data centers linked on our website home page for those that want to dive deeper.
