Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined, then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal status of the USA's power grid and related infrastructure and the already exploding costs that have been shifted to residential users in order to guarantee electric supply to these biggest datacenters (so they can keep paying peanuts for electricity and avoid shouldering any of the infrastructural burden to maintain or improve the underlying grid/plants required to meet their massive power needs).

I'm not even anti-datacenter (wouldn't be here if I were), I just think there needs to be serious rebalancing of these costs because this increase in US residential electric prices in just five years (from 13¢ to 19¢, a ridiculous 46% increase) is neither fair nor sustainable.

So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from and who is going to pay for it?

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610

EDIT:

To everyone arguing this is how DCs are normally sized: yes, but normally it's not the company providing the compute for the DC owner that is giving these numbers. nVidia doesn't sell empty datacenters with power distribution networks, cooling, and little else; nVidia sells the GPUs that will stock that DC. This isn't a typical PR netnewswire bulletin "OpenAI announces new 10GW datacenter", this is "nvidia is providing xx compute for OpenAI". Anyway, all this is a segue from the question of power supply, consumption, grid expansion/stability, and who is paying for all that.

I work in the datacenter space. The power consumption of a data center is the "canonical" way to describe their size.

Almost every component in a datacenter is upgradeable—in fact, the compute itself only has a lifespan of ~5 years—but the power requirements are basically locked-in. A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.

The fact that we use this unit really nails the fact that AI is basically refining energy.

DC infra is always allocated in terms of watts. From this number, everything else is extrapolated (e.g. rough IT load, cooling needed, etc).

> is neither fair nor sustainable

That's half what I pay in Italy, I'm sure the richest country in the world will do fine.

> So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from and who is going to pay for it?

I would also like to know. It's a LOT of power to supply. Nvidia does have a ~3% stake in Applied Digital, a bitcoin miner that pivoted to AI (also a "Preferred NVIDIA Cloud Partner") with facilities in North Dakota. So they might be involved for a fraction of those 10GW, but it seems like it will be a small fraction even with all the planned expansions.

https://www.investopedia.com/applied-digital-stock-soars-on-...

https://ir.applieddigital.com/news-events/press-releases/det...

> Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy

Exactly. When I saw the headline I assumed it would contain some sort of ambitious green energy build-out, or at least a commitment to acquire X% of the energy from renewable sources. That's the only reason I can think to brag about energy consumption

Datacenters need to provide their own power/storage, and connect to the grid just to trade excess energy or provide grid stability. Given the 5-7 year backlog of photovoltaic projects waiting for interconnect, the grid is kind of a dinosaur that needs to be routed around

“ skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years”

This is probably naïve. Prices skyrocketed in Germany for similar reasons before AI data centers were a thing.

Watt is the hottest new currency in big tech. Want to launch something big? You don't have to ask for dollars or headcount or servers or whatever else used to be the bottleneck in the past. There's plenty of all this to go around (and if not it can be easily bought). Success or failure now depends on whether you can beg and plead your way to getting a large enough kilowatt/megawatt allocation over every other team that's fighting for it. Everything is measured this way.

I had my highest power bill last month in 4 years, in a month that was unseasonably cool so no AC for most of the month. Why are we as citizens without equity in these businesses subsidizing the capital class?

To me, the question is less about “how do we make more energy” and more about “how do we make LLMs 100x more energy efficient.” Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but it all seems like a stinky code smell.

This feels like a return to the moment just before Deepseek when the market was feeling all fat and confident that "more GPUs == MOAR AI". They don't understand the science, so they really want a simple figure to point to that means "this is the winner".

Framing it in GW is just giving them what they want, even if it makes no sense.

An 8% increase y/o/y is quite substantial, however keep in mind globally we experienced the 2022 fuel shock. In Australia for example we saw energy prices double that year.

Although wholesale electricity prices show double-digit average year-on-year swings, their true long-run growth is closer to ~6% per year, slightly above wages at ~4% during the same period.

So power has become somewhat less affordable, but still remains a small share of household income. In other words, wage growth has absorbed much of the real impact, and power prices are still a fraction of household income.

You can make it sound shocking with statements like “In 1999, a household’s wholesale power cost was about $150 a year, in 2022, that same household would be charged more than $1,000, even as wages only grew 2.5x”, but the real impact (on average, obviously there are outliers and low income households are disproportionately impacted in areas where gov doesn’t subsidise) isn’t major.

https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts/annual-volu...

0,19 per kwh. Damn man, here it is like 0,97 per kwh (Western Europe) … stop complaining

DCs need to align their training cycles with the peak of renewable power generation

Utilities always need to justify rate increases with the regulator.

The bulk of cost increases come from the transition to renewable energy. You can check your local utility and see.

It’s very easy to make a huge customer like a data center directly pay the cost needed to serve them from the grid.

Generation of electricity is more complicated, the data centers pulling cheap power from Colombia river hydro are starting to compete with residential users.

Generation is a tiny fraction of electricity charges though.

I actually don’t like this measurement, as it’s vague and dilutes the announcement. Each product has a different efficiency of watts.

Imagine Ford announced “a strategic partnership with FedEx to deploy 10 giga-gallons of ICE vehicles”

Prices of _everything_ went up over the past five years. Datacenter expansion was far from the main driver. Dollars and cents aren't worth what they used to be.

I mean gigawatts is a concise metric to get a grasp of the amount of gpu compute they install, but the honesty seems a bit strange to me imo.

> So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from

If the US petro-regime wasn't fighting against cheap energy sources this would be a rounding error in the country's solar deployment.

China deployed 277GW of solar in 2024 and is accelerating, having deployed 212GW in the first half of 2025. 10 GW could be a pebble in the road, but instead it will be a boulder.

Voters should be livid that their power bills are going up instead of plummeting.

Theoretically couldn't you use all the waste heat from the data center to generate electricity again, making the "actual" consumption of the data center much lower?