---
title: "Gigawatt: what it means · The AI Compute Race · DRYBURGH"
source: https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gigawatt
description: "Gigawatt: The unit a power plant is counted in, written GW, about one large nuclear reactor."
---

# Gigawatt

What does “Gigawatt” mean?

GigawattThe unit a power plant is counted in, written GW, about one large nuclear reactor. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s essay *Situational Awareness* of 2024, behind the interview with which chapter 1 opens, made it the unit of the argument. *Chapter 1.*

From *The AI Compute Race*. [Read the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#buy)

## Where the book uses it

- [Chapter 1 — The Stakes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-1)What the race is for: the belief that a lead in AI can compound into a lasting advantage, how long such leads have actually lasted, and what a trillion dollars a year is being bet against.

## Where the record uses it

- Campus [Colossus 2](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger/colossus-2)
- Scorecard indicator [Largest evidenced operating site](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard#row-11)
- Scorecard indicator [Frozen 40-campus conversion](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard#row-12)
- Scorecard indicator [OpenAI/Stargate conversion in cohort](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard#row-13)
- Dated test [Chapter 14, AI 2027, an outside forecast, due 31 December 2027](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests#2027-32)
- Dated test [Chapter 6, firm service is the constraint, due 31 December 2028](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests#2028-12)
- Dated test [Chapter 13, mass is money, due 31 December 2030](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests#2030-1)
- Dated test [Chapter 13, orbit is a change of landlord, due 31 December 2030](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests#2030-2)

## Sources that use it

- AMD, “AMD and Anthropic Announce Strategic Partnership to Deploy Up to 2 Gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs,” 22 July 2026 (up to 2 GW for Anthropic, the first gigawatt beginning in H1 2027; AMD may invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic; “AMD has committed to make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic in the future”); OpenAI up to 6 GW and Meta up to 6 GW, each in its own release, at the second and third addresses. [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#amd-anthropic-2gw)
- Crusoe, “Crusoe’s Contracted AI Infrastructure Capacity Approaches 5 Gigawatts,” 9 June 2026 (the Abilene campus “purpose built for Oracle”; the first two buildings operational, six under construction; Crusoe “manufactures long-lead electrical components at its own facilities in Colorado, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and ships prefabbed equipment ready for installation”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#crusoe-5gw)
- NVIDIA, “OpenAI and NVIDIA Announce Strategic Partnership to Deploy 10 Gigawatts of NVIDIA Systems,” 22 September 2025 (a letter of intent “to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems”; “NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed”; the first gigawatt “in the second half of 2026”; read whole in book 1’s capture of 29 August 2026, reference 4 of report 26). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#nvidia-openai-10gw-sep25)
- NVIDIA, “SK Group and NVIDIA Expand Strategic Partnership Across AI Factories and Next-Generation Memory,” press release, 24 July 2026 (“plans for a $500-billion-plus comprehensive partnership”; “signed letters of intent to formalize the agreement”; the two-gigawatt-scale cloud “built on the NVIDIA DSX full-stack AI factory architecture”, which the release says integrates NVIDIA’s computing, systems, software and partner technologies “to deliver the lowest token cost at maximum energy efficiency”; the subhead caps the factory at “up to 2 Gigawatts” and the release plans “the first AI factory” of the 2-gigawatt-scale cloud “to come online in 2027”; SK hynix’s “long-term AI memory partnership with NVIDIA” “allows NVIDIA to secure a stable supply of next-generation AI memory, while enabling SK hynix to expand the foundation for growth”, with no figure, volume or term stated). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#nvidia-sk-loi-2026)
- Ellie Holbrook, Robert Boswall, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Nicolas Bontigui and Dylan Patel, “What is So Hard About Behind-The-Meter Power For Datacenters? Part 1,” *SemiAnalysis*, 10 September 2026 (the free portion of a paid post, 7,872 of 9,577 words by the publisher’s count; tallies of the firm’s own energy model: “Our Energy Model now tracks 75GW of firm, binding orders in the supply chain only for for behind-the-meter AI compute - of which ~20GW alone ordered in Q2 2026”, the doubled word the post’s; “by the end of the year, ~3GW of operational US datacenter IT capacity will be powered behind-the-meter”; “Oracle’s 1.3GW IT Project Jupiter”; the chart beneath the 75GW sentence, read as an image, titled “Datacenters Have Booked About 75 GW of Onsite Generation” and subtitled “Generation booked for behind-the-meter datacenter power, US, GW nameplate, cumulative by announcement quarter, batteries excluded”, from the model’s “edition 24 Aug 2026”, with no figure for any quarter but the last; of orders without a home, buyers who “pay deposits, yet don’t have actual datacenter sites to deploy them”; and later in the post, of the 3 GW, “3GW of Datacenter IT capacity is already running with behind-the-meter power plants”; the post’s chart of orders by quarter, read as an image, subtitled “Quarterly order capacity since 1Q25 · stripes mark capacity without a downstream project”, prints 0.4, 6.3, 5.7, 7.8, 19.3 and 22.8 GW over the quarters from 1Q25 to 2Q26 and “11.8 QTD” for the third quarter to 24 August, a box reading “74.2 GW SINCE 1Q25”, “70% PROJECT-LINKED”, “30% STILL UNALLOCATED”, and the footnote “All tracker statuses, including Announced; dated by stored deal-announcement quarter”; the chart under its two 3 GW sentences, subtitled “Quarter-end operational US IT capacity by onsite power technology”, prints “2.9 GW” over 4Q26, a box reading “0.3 → 2.9 GW” and “9.0× BY Q4 2026”, and the footnote “Q3 2026 onward reflects the Energy Model outlook.”; both images held in the Library since 12 October 2026 and read again on 13 October 2026; the chart beneath the “$100B per GW per year” sentence, read as an image, titled “On a GB300 Cluster, Revenue Per Gigawatt Climbs 8× Up the AI Stack”, measured in “$B per GW per year” and sourced to the “SemiAnalysis Tokenomics Model, SemiAnalysis Inference Simulator”, with five bars: “Neocloud 5-yr IaaS average” (“typical Oracle, CoreWeave & Nebius pricing”) $12B at 1.0×, “B300 on-demand” $29B, “SpaceX + Anthropic” $31B and “SpaceX + Google” $48B both marked “deal”, and “OpenAI / Anthropic inference API” $100B at 8.3×, the chart dating its prices nowhere) (SemiAnalysis sells subscriptions, consulting and its own models of chip, memory and datacenter supply into the markets it measures; its closing section is for paid subscribers and was not read; held in the Library since its capture of 5 October 2026). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/research#semianalysis-btm-sep26)

And 2 more: [search the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources).

## Related terms

- [GW](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gw)
- [Mass is money](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/mass-is-money)
- [Megawatt](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/megawatt)
- [Algorithmic efficiency](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/algorithmic-efficiency)
- [Application layer](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/application-layer)
- [Arsenal behind every arsenal](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/arsenal-behind-every-arsenal)
- [Capital expenditure](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/capital-expenditure)
- [Clocks of diffusion](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/clocks-of-diffusion)
- [Cluster](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/cluster)
- [Epoch AI](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/epoch-ai)
- [Exclusive generation](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/exclusive-generation)
- [Exclusivity of the model](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/exclusivity-of-the-model)

From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.

- [Campuses](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger)
- [Tests](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests)
- [Scorecard](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard)
- [Data](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/data/releases)
- [Chapter by chapter](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/companion)
- [The record at a glance](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/observatory)
- [The machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/machine)
- [One campus, four futures](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/hyperion)
- [Glossary](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary)
- [People](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/people)
- [Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources)
- [Notes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes)
- [Where the book was wrong](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/corrections)
- [Where its sources were wrong](https://dryburgh.com/corrections?book=vol1)
- [The Paper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/paper)
- [Consent](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/consent)
- [Who builds and pays](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/parties)

*The AI Compute Race: Five Races, One Machine* is a book by Lee S. Dryburgh, the first volume of THE COMPUTE ECONOMY, published by Dryburgh, an imprint of Contestra OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia; its record closes on 8 November 2026.

[About the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1)[Tell me when it is out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#notify)