Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.

The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.

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lokar a minute ago | parent | next [-]

There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.

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T-A an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...

https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent [-]

> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]

Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.

But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.

1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...

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timr 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use

Not even close to a true statement.

EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].

According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

	▲	cogman10 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much. If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh). It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.

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LaurensBER an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.

I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.

This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).

	▲	rocqua 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not ‘spare goes to training’. These data centres are training first. Inference is really rather efficient, so not why datacenters are so big.

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verdverm 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we can have more electricity at lower prices when we're ready

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...