Natural gas is back in favor in the US.

In the first six months of this year, power producers announced plans to build more gas-fired capacity than they did in all of 2020.

That’s in large part a result of soaring demand from data centers, new manufacturing facilities and electric vehicles.

“This gas business is going into a great decade,” GE Vernova Inc. boss Scott Strazik said last week as he revealed his company’s gas-turbine production capacity is set to grow by a third.

It’s a remarkable change of fortune for gas power in America. Just a few years ago, climate goals and plummeting clean-energy prices supported the notion that the US was nearing peak consumption.

That was before the startling growth of artificial intelligence.

Electricity use by AI data centers alone is poised to grow as much as 10-fold by 2030. While some tech customers are investing in green energy to meet that demand, utilities and power providers also plan new gas-fired generation to fill the gap.

Climate advocates are understandably dismayed. For one thing, more gas boosts the risk of leaks from pipelines and wells. Emissions of methane — the main component of natural gas — heat the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide.

For another, new generation capacity means fossil fuels are likely to have a longer lifespan, while increased demand will also slow the retirement of older plants, Wood Mackenzie Ltd. analyst Patrick Finn said. “It makes clean-energy goals that much more difficult to attain.”

(Michael R. Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg News’ parent company Bloomberg LP, has contributed to campaigns to phase out fossil-fuel power plants.)