Breanne Kidd used to watch the sun rise over Ohio farmland from her front window while she got ready for the toddlers at her home daycare. Now she watches cranes and steel. And across the street from her house in Wood County, about 25 miles south of Toledo, sits the Apollo Generating Station, a natural gas power plant large enough to power 100,000 homes. It was built to serve Meta's 800-acre Bowling Green data center next door. Nobody told her it was coming.

"It's not like we're two streets away. We're literally across the street," Kidd told Reuters. "I'm living next to a threat."

Her story is not unusual. It is, increasingly, a pattern.

The approval machine

Reuters reviewed regulatory filings and interviewed public officials, residents, researchers, and company executives across the country. What they found: at least 57 large natural gas power plants have been proposed or are under construction in the United States, each built off the public grid to serve a single data center. Their combined capacity totals 73,000 megawatts, enough to power tens of millions of homes. More than a dozen of those projects won approval in under a year, with little or no notice to nearby residents.

The Apollo plant in Ohio cleared the state's power siting board on February 3, less than three months after plans were submitted. The draft air permit wasn't publicly available until March. Construction had already started.

The paperwork didn't even name Meta as the client. It listed a subsidiary called Liames LLC.

That kind of opacity runs through the whole system. Some developers have signed non-disclosure agreements with local governments. Others have operated through shell companies. Local officials in some cases have redacted public documents or waived the hearings that would normally be required before a plant of this size could be built.

The central legal argument developers use is straightforward: because these plants are built off the main grid to serve a private customer, they fall outside many of the permitting rules that apply to public utilities. That argument has been accepted, repeatedly and quickly, by state regulators in Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, Utah, and others.

What actually burns, and who breathes it

Natural gas power plants emit nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter when they burn fuel. Both are linked to respiratory illness. They also emit greenhouse gases. These are not theoretical risks. They are the reason conventional power plants require years of environmental review, public comment periods, and air quality studies before construction begins.

Michael Cork, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, told Reuters that the AI industry's off-grid gas generation "is emerging as one of the largest under-examined air-quality risks in the country." The people most exposed are often the ones who found out last, or never found out at all until construction crews showed up.

Two of these plants are already operating. One is xAI's facility outside Memphis, built by SpaceX. Another serves Vantage Data Centers in Ashburn, Virginia.

The race framing

The Trump administration has explicitly backed accelerating permits for AI infrastructure, citing competition with China. The EPA has signaled it wants to make the United States "the AI Capital of the World." Ohio, West Virginia, Texas, and Utah have all moved to formalize faster approval processes for these projects.

Supporters argue the plants are necessary to keep AI development moving without pushing costs onto ordinary electricity customers. That argument has real weight. Data centers placed on the main grid drive up demand and, ultimately, rates for everyone else. Off-grid plants avoid that.

But the trade-off being made is not only economic. It is about who gets to decide what gets built next to where people live. Right now, in dozens of places across the country, that decision is being made without the people who live there having any formal say. The plants go up, the permits follow, and the neighbors find out when the cranes arrive.

Kidd's daycare is still open. The plant across the street is still being built.