Demand for electricity is rising so quickly in the United States that even Exxon Mobil, the country’s largest oil and gas company, is planning to get into the power business.

Exxon is designing a massive natural-gas fueled plant meant to directly supply electricity to data centers. The company says the plant will be fitted with technology that can capture more than 90 percent of the facility’s carbon dioxide emissions, the leading cause of climate change.

The project, which is in the early stages of development, would be the first time that Exxon built a power plant that did not supply electricity to its own operations.

In addition, only a very small number of power plants have systems to capture the carbon dioxide released by the burning of fuel before it reaches the atmosphere so that it can be permanently stored under ground. Such systems have been slow to take off because they are incredibly expensive, even with federal subsidies.

However, technology giants have been willing to pay a premium for cleaner sources of electricity that can operate continuously, including nuclear power plants.

Exxon said it had secured land and is talking with potential customers. The company aims to have the power plant running within the next five years, faster than new nuclear reactors could probably be built.

In another unusual setup, the plant would not be connected to the electric grid, which could hasten its start date. Requests to connect to the grid are often backlogged; grid managers can sometimes take years to approve them.

That such a project is on the table at Exxon, a company that previously dismissed the idea of investing in the power business, shows just how much the growth of data centers and the rise of artificial intelligence are reshaping the energy industry.

“We’re being driven by the market demand here,” Dan Ammann, who leads the company’s low-carbon business, said in an interview with The New York Times. “It’s low carbon, it’s available on an accelerated timeline and it avoids all the grid interconnection challenges.”

Mr. Ammann declined to say how much the plant would cost or where it would be built. Whether and when Exxon moves forward with the project will depend on customer feedback, he said.

The company, which is based near Houston, mostly produces and processes oil and natural gas. It’s likely to spend around $3 billion this year on alternative energy sources or reducing emissions, about 11 percent of its capital spending, according to estimates by UBS.

But Exxon has some of the pieces it needs to make such a project feasible. It operates networks of carbon-dioxide pipelines along the Gulf Coast and in Wyoming and Montana. It aims to filter carbon dioxide out of the power plant’s exhaust stream, transport it via those pipelines and ultimately bury it.

With a planned electricity generating capacity of more than 1.5 gigawatts, the power plant would be roughly twice the size of the nuclear reactor that Microsoft is effectively paying Constellation Energy to restart on Three Mile Island, outside of Harrisburg, Pa.

Much like the electricity to be produced there, “this will be a premium product,” Mr. Ammann said.

The federal government provides tax credits to encourage the development and use of carbon capture and storage. But those subsidies aren’t generous enough to fully offset the cost of using that technology at natural gas power plants, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

There are no natural gas power plants fitted with carbon capture technology operating at commercial scale in the United States, according to the Global CCS Institute, a research organization that aims to spur greater investment in carbon capture and storage.

The International Energy Agency, a multilateral organization based in Paris, says the technology would be needed to reach international climate targets, but such systems have struggled to gain traction.

Exxon’s foray into gas-fired power generation comes as other oil and gas companies are pulling back from investments in cleaner forms of energy, where returns have lagged in recent years.

The project would be a shift for Exxon, whose chief executive, Darren Woods, often describes the company as being in the business of extracting and transforming molecules, not selling electrons — the basic units of electricity.

“We are not going to go into electrons,” Mr. Woods told investors last year.

Mr. Ammann, who will soon take over Exxon’s oil and gas extraction business, said the company began exploring the power business this year, as it became clear how quickly demand for electricity was poised to grow because of data centers.

Goldman Sachs recently projected that power demand from U.S. data centers would grow about 15 percent a year on average through the end of the decade.

“This is 100 percent consistent with everything that we’ve said that we will focus on so far, which is around where we can bring unique advantage and capability,” Mr. Ammann said.

Exxon now operates gas power plants in Texas, Louisiana and Illinois, primarily to supply its own operations.

The company on Wednesday is poised to update investors on its corporate strategy.