Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, [tech capitalists] are driving emissions sharply higher with their quest to expand “AI” and cloud computing.

To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming.

“AI may feel completely digital, immaterial, but its infrastructure is very physical. It needs land, power plants, transmission, water and fuel, and those choices can last for decades,” said the Harvard researcher, Gianluca Guidi, who based his analysis on air permits, corporate disclosures, community presentations and other materials collected largely by the research firm Cleanview.

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“It is a disaster from a climate perspective,” said Thomas Day, director of corporate accountability at the New Climate Institute, a Germany-based nonprofit that tracks corporate emissions pledges. “These companies are locking in huge fossil fuel projects that will become some of the biggest emitters in the world. It’s not like these are one-offs. We are seeing more and more of them, with no end in sight.”