Power available every hour without interruption. A firm, around-the-clock connection needs four things at once, energy over the year, capacity at the peak, deliverability to the site and firmness, which is all of them every hour; a training run pays for the lack of it in restarts, and a shopping mall can survive losing it for an hour. Chapter 6.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Defined in Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock.
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Where the electricity comes from: grid queues, transformers, turbines and the firm power a datacenter needs every hour of the year, on calendars the buildout does not control.
Also discussed in
- Chapter notes Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Firm power.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/firm-power (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-firm-power-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Firm power}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/firm-power},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}