The AI Compute Race Glossary kW

kW

What does “kW” mean?

kW

See megawatt.

Megawatt A thousandth of a gigawatt, written MW. A kilowatt, written kW, is a thousandth of a megawatt. Chapter 6.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Sources that use it

  • Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division, City of Memphis, “Electric Service Schedule TDC, Time of Use Data Service,” rate effective 1 October 2026 (for loads classified in NAICS subsectors 518 or 519 or “used, in Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) sole judgment, for the operation of computational equipment”; four classes by contract demand, TDCA to TDCD, the largest above 25,000 kW; under the TDCB, TDCC and TDCD rates “the contract shall be for an initial term of at least 5 years,” under TDCA at least 1 year; each billing demand “shall in no case be less than the sum” of steps from “30 percent of the first 5,000 kW” to “85 percent of all kW in excess of 350,000 kW” of the higher of the contract demand or the highest billing demand of the preceding 12 months) In the Sources
  • Meta Engineering, “Meta’s infrastructure evolution and the advent of AI,” 29 September 2025 (Hyperion to come online beginning in 2028 and scale to 5 GW; the Catalina reference design of 72 Blackwell GPUs at about 140 kW in the accelerator portion of a six-rack pod; fleet deploying GB200, beginning GB300, also AMD MI300 and MTIA; “Once finished, the Hyperion cluster will have the ability to scale up to a capacity of 5 gigawatts”; “Prometheus, our 1-gigawatt cluster, is currently underway”; “We accomplished this by building this cluster across several of our traditional data center buildings as well as several weatherproof tents, and adjacent colocation facilities”; “We are also evolving our software stack, including Twine and MAST, to support long-distance training across a geographically distributed set of data centers”). In the Sources
  • NVIDIA, “GB300 NVL72” product page and NVL72 AI-factory reference architecture, components page (“Full rack requiring up to 142 kW”; 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs; liquid-cooled; each GPU with eighteen fifth-generation NVLink links, “one per in-rack NVSwitch via the copper backplane,” so that “a single rack may form a fully connected L1 Domain with 72 GPUs,” read 20 September 2026), accessed 29 August and 4 September 2026. In the Sources
  • NVIDIA, “Hardware — NVIDIA DGX GB Rack Scale Systems User Guide” (GB200 NVL72: 72 GPUs, 36 CPUs, 18 compute trays, 9 NVLink switch trays; approximately 120 kW), accessed 29 August 2026. In the Sources
  • NVIDIA, “NVIDIA DGX H100/H200 User Guide,” documentation page as served 19 September 2026 (the user guide rates each DGX H100 system at “10.2 kW max.” against six 3300 W supplies in 4+2 redundancy, and gives its airflow as “1105 CFM Front-to-Back @ 80% fan PWM” and its heat output as “38,557 BTU/hr”; copy held, md5 7fa490d7499bf6c32c8ed730bc4f6071). In the Sources

And 11 more: search the Sources.

Related terms

From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.

How to cite this page

Dryburgh, Lee S. “kW.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/kw (accessed 2026-11-01).

BibTeX

@misc{dryburgh-kw-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{kW}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/kw},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}

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