Amazon is quietly trying to build the biggest gas power plant in the country.
The Distilled newsletter reported Friday that the megacorporation has bought land and acquired permits in Pecos County, Texas, for an AI data center powered by a 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant. The plant will be completely separate from Texas’s power grid, at least in the beginning, the permits show.
The site, known as GW Ranch, got a state permit allowing the proposed power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide, which would make it the biggest pollution site in the U.S., emitting more than the country’s biggest coal power plant, according to Distilled. That’s in sharp contrast to Amazon’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge.
Amazon filed three construction permits with the state of Texas this week to build three data center buildings immediately upon approval. Land clearing has already begun, according to satellite imagery. Amazon would join Microsoft, Google, and Meta in having its own off-grid gas power.
Amazon says that it has 10 gigawatts of carbon-free energy across 40 projects to power its existing data center operations in Texas, and that the GW Ranch will use brackish groundwater that isn’t potable and thus can’t be used for irrigation or drinking.
But that’s not likely to quell public opposition. Data centers are hugely unpopular across the country among Republicans and Democrats, both in rural and suburban areas. The centers don’t create many jobs or boost local economies. If connected to local power grids, they can drive utility rates up and cause black- and brownouts. Amid climate change and droughts, the claim that data centers will take advantage of unusable water will likely invite skepticism.
The fact that Amazon is building its own power plant for the project will be a small comfort for residents worried about utility rates, but locals still will have concerns about pollution from a gas plant bigger than any other in the U.S. Rural Texas is deeply Republican, and despite President Donald Trump’s delusions about data centers’ popularity, opposition to them on the right is growing. Now that this project is public, a big backlash could soon follow.
Representative Max Miller blamed a daycare after his daughter was rushed to the hospital last year with bruises.
Miller sued a Westlake, Ohio, daycare provider in February 2025, after the daughter he shares with his ex-wife Emily Moreno (the daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno) was taken to an emergency room with injuries “on her thighs, face, groin, and vaginal area of her body and she was caused to incur psychological trauma.” Her mother took the girl, then under two years old, to a hospital on January 27 after a daycare staff member alerted police as well as the Department of Children and Family Services.
The lawsuit doesn’t clearly state where her injuries came from, and Miller has a long list of abuse allegations against him regarding his ex-wife and daughter, even allegedly fracturing his daughter’s collarbone. His lawsuit, filed four months before his divorce was finalized, accuses the school and four named employees of “failing to properly train and supervise their staff in the proper treatment of children in their care. Defendants abused and neglected a child dependent upon them for protection.”
Miller is the only person named in the complaint, and Moreno isn’t mentioned. Miller claims in the lawsuit that an investigation from county authorities backs up his claims, along with video and audio evidence documenting alleged abuse and neglect. The school denied the allegations, stating that the toddler was not “injured, brutalized, or harmed in any manner while under the defendants’ alleged care and supervision.”
The case was dismissed four months ago, and if there was a settlement, it hasn’t been disclosed. In light of newly revealed allegations that Miller has a habit of holding his daughter’s beloved blue bunny hostage and his admission that he shared an inappropriate photo of her online, this lawsuit raises even more questions.
Women accounted for 100 percent of the decline in the labor force in July, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s latest dismal jobs report.
Overall, the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July: Women lost 32,000 jobs, while men gained 9,000. Many of the jobs lost were in local government and leisure and hospitality—real jobs that real women, who are already dealing with slowed wages and rising inflation, work.
Meanwhile, a whopping 165,000 women exited the work force last month, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a new job. The number of men in the labor force remained steady.