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Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of dat
by ComputerGuru 1y ago
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 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.
- apercu 1y agoI 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- randomNumber7 1y agoI 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.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoTotal gigawatts is the maximum amount of power that can be supplied from the power generating station and consumed at the DC through the infrastructure and hardware as it was built. Whether they use all those gigawatts and what they use them for would be considered optional and variable from time to time.
- stogot 1y agoI 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”
- mensetmanusman 1y agoIt’s a sticky metric though because Moores law per power consumption died years ago.
- deelowe 1y agoDC infra is always allocated in terms of watts. From this number, everything else is extrapolated (e.g. rough IT load, cooling needed, etc).
- elbasti 1y agoI 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.
- pseudosavant 1y agoI love that term "refining energy". We need to plan for massive growth in electricity production to have the supply to refine.
- tmalsburg2 1y agoSounds smart but it’s abusing the semantics of “refine” and is therefore ultimately vacuous.
- pseudosavant 1y agoI think it is really just the difference between chemically refining something and electrically refining something. Raw AC comes in, then gets stepped down, filtered, converted into DC rails, gated, timed, and pulsed. That’s already an industrial refinement process. The "crude" incoming power is shaped into the precise, stable forms that CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, and networking can actually use. Then those stable voltages get flipped billions of times per second into ordered states, which become instructions, models, inferences, and other high-value "product." It sure seems like series of processes for refining something.
- reubenmorais 1y agoAll life is basically refining energy - standing up to entropy and temporarily winning the fight.
- 1y ago
- gitpusher 1y ago> 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
- 7952 1y agoOr this brings power and prestige to the country that hosts it. And it gives clout precisely because it is seemingly wasteful. Finding the energy is a problem for the civilian government who either go "drill baby drill" or throw wind/solar/nuclear at the problem.
- paxys 1y agoWatt 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.
- monkeydust 1y agoExplains why Meta is entering power trading space https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/09/22/meta-pushes-into-power-trading-as-ai-sends-demand-soaring-00572995 https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/09/22...
- elphinstone 1y agoThat gives me Enron vibes, even though these are vastly different situations. But the idea of a social media company trading in this space is nuts.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago“ 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.
- paulsutter 1y agoDatacenters 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
- abstractwater 1y ago> 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-ai-data-center-deal-with-nvidia-backed-coreweave-11746792 https://www.investopedia.com/applied-digital-stock-soars-on-... https://ir.applieddigital.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/127/applied-digital-to-break-ground-on-3-billion-polaris-forge https://ir.applieddigital.com/news-events/press-releases/det...
- dantillberg 1y agoPrices 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.
- basilgohar 1y agoElsewhere it was mentioned that DCs pay less for electricity per Wh than residential customers. If that is the case, then it's not just about inflation, but also unfair pricing putting more of the infrastructure costs on residential customers whereas the demand increase is coming from commercial ones.
- aaronmdjones 1y agoIndustrial electricity consumers pay lower unit rates per kWh, but they also pay for any reactive power that they consume and then return -- residential consumers do not. As in, what industrial consumers actually pay is a unit cost per kVAh, not kWh. This means loads with pretty abysmal power factors (like induction motors) actually end up costing the business more money than if they ran them at home (assuming the home had a sufficient supply of power). Further, they get these lower rates in exchange for being deprioritised -- in grid instability (e.g. an ongoing frequency decline because demand outstrips available supply), they will be the first consumers to be disconnected from the grid. Rolling blackouts affecting residential consumers are the last resort. There are two sides to this coin. Note that I am in no way siding with this whole AI electricity consumption disaster. I can't wait for this bubble to pop so we can get back to normality. 10GW is a third of the entire daily peak demand of my country (the United Kingdom). It's ridiculous. Edit: Practical Engineering (YouTube channel) has a pretty decent video on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkNTwWJP5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkNTwWJP5k
- whatever1 1y agoDCs need to align their training cycles with the peak of renewable power generation
- justincormack 1y agoThey are starting to include batteries so they dont have to adjust to external factors
- apimade 1y agoAn 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-volume-weighted-average-30-minute-prices-regions https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts/annual-volu...
- atkailash 1y agoI wouldn’t call a $100-270 electric bill a “fraction” when it’s about 5% post tax income. I use a single light on a timer and have a small apartment Especially since these sorts of corporations can get tax breaks or har means of getting regulators to allow spreading the cost. Residential shouldn’t see any increase due to data centers, but they do, and will, supplement them while seeing minimal changes to infrastructure When people are being told to minimize air conditioning but then these big datacenters are made and aren’t told “reduce your consumption” then it doesn’t matter how big or small the electric bill is, it’s supplementing a multi billion dollar corporation’s toy
- bushbaba 1y ago6% YoY is much higher than the 2-3% inflation target
- richrichardsson 1y agoSo a 6.6x increase in power bill, offset by a 2.5x wage increase has no major impact? I'm sure none of the other outgoings for a household saw similar increases. /s
- cavisne 1y agoUtilities 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.
- mvanbaak 1y ago0,19 per kwh. Damn man, here it is like 0,97 per kwh (Western Europe) … stop complaining
- patrickmcnamara 1y agoThis is not true. The average in the EU is 0,287 €/kWh. I pay 0,34 €/kWh in Berlin.
- distances 1y agoAnd in Germany the price includes transmission and taxes, it's the consumer end price. You have to remember that some countries report electricity price without transmission or taxes, also in consumer context, so you need to be careful with comparisons.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Rexxar 1y agoRegulated price in France: - 0,1952 per kWh for uniform price. - 0,1635 / 0,2081 for day/nigh pricing - 0,1232 /... / 0,6468 for variable pricing https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Offres/Grille_prix_Tarif_Bleu.pdf https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of... You have a very bad deal if you pay 0.97€ per kWh.
- mullingitover 1y ago> 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.
- bushbaba 1y agoHow would that solar power a DC at night or on a cloudy day? Energy storage isn’t cheap.
- mullingitover 1y agoIn 2025 it’s cheaper to demolish an operating coal plant and replace it with solar and battery, and prices are still dropping.
- parineum 1y agoWhy aren't all these businesses doing that then?
- parineum 1y agoI'm living in one of the most expensive electricity markets in the US. It has a lot more to do with the state shutting down cheap petro energy (natural gas) and nuclear then replacing it with... tbd.
- Saline9515 1y agoFyi capacity announced is very far from the real capacity when dealing with renewables. It's like saying that you bought a Ferrari so now you can drive at 300km/h on the road all of the time. In mid latitudes, 1 GW of solar power produces around 5.5 GWh/day. So the "real" equivalent is a 0.23 GW gas or nuclear plant (even lower when accounting for storage losses). But "China installed 63 GW-equivalent" of solar power is a bit less interesting, so we go for the fake figures ;-)
- p1necone 1y agoTheoretically 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Blackthorn 1y agoNo.
- quasse 1y agoGiven that steam turbine efficiency depends on the temperature delta between steam input and condenser, unlikely unless you're somehow going to adapt Nvidia GPUs to run with cooling loop water at 250C+.
- distances 1y agoIn the Nordics the waste heat is used for district heating. This practical heat sink really favors northern countries for datacenter builds. In addition you usually get abundant water and lower population density (meaning easier to build renewables that have excess capacity).
- pjc50 1y agoThermodynamics says no. In fact you have to spend energy to remove that heat from the cores. (Things might be different if you had some sort of SiC process that let you run a GPU at 500C core temperatures, then you could start thinking of meaningful uses for that, but you'd still need a river or sea for the cool side just as you do for nuclear plants)
- epolanski 1y ago> 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.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>I'm sure the richest country in the world will do fine. You underestimate how addicted the US is to cheap energy and how wasteful it is at the same time. Remember how your lifestyle always expands to fill the available resources no matter how good you have it? Well if tomorrow they'd have to pay EU prices, the country would have a war. When you lived your entire life not caring about the energy bill or about saving energy, it's crippling to suddenly have scale back and be frugal even if that price would still be less than what other countries pay.
- impjohn 1y agoIt's hard to appreciate the difference in 'abundance mentality' between the median US and EU person. It always struck me as an interesting culture difference. While both EU and US grew in prosperity post WWII, I feel the US narrative was quite on another level.
- modo_mario 1y agoHere in Belgium a stupid amount of that bill is hidden taxes. i kind of assume it's similar in Italy.
- epolanski 1y agoWe import most of our energy, that's really it.
- port11 1y agoAnd the substantial increase in profits for all providers, which isn't comparable to that of our neighbours. Our disposable income in Belgium really exists to subsidise energy companies, supermarkets, and a pathetic housing market.
- deleted 1y ago
- ianks 1y agoTo 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.
- sothatsit 1y agoI'm pretty confident that if LLMs were made 100x more energy efficient, we would just build bigger LLMs or run more parallel inference. OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro could become the baseline, and their crazy expensive IMO model could become the Pro offering. Especially if that energy efficiency came with speedups as well (I would be surprised if it didn't). The demand for smarter models seems very strong.
- XorNot 1y agoThis 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.