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
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.
Where the record uses it
Sources that use it
- Harsh Singh Banwait, “NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave: 10x More Tokens Per Megawatt Than Blackwell,” CoreWeave blog, 21 July 2026 (CoreWeave’s own measurement, on DeepSeek R1: “At a matched interactivity target, Vera Rubin NVL72 generated 10x tokens-per-second per megawatt compared to NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 on the same DeepSeek R1 workload”; the conditions, “with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on,” among them “large-scale expert parallelism, NVFP4 precision, multi-token prediction, and disaggregated prefill and decode”; the page’s other wording of the result, “up to 10x higher tokens per megawatt”; what it means for customers, in the company’s words: “run far more reasoning-model traffic within the same power budget or run the same traffic on far less power”; CoreWeave sells the capacity it measured, and NVIDIA’s blog of the same day relays the figure as its own platform’s; the comparison on both systems, “This evaluation compares the performance on each platform with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on”; read in the page as served in October 2026, which carries its publication date). In the Sources
- Dylan Patel, “Meta Discusses AI Hardware and Co-packaged Optics,” SemiAnalysis, 15 September 2022 (a report of a talk at the AI Hardware Summit in Santa Clara by Alexis Black Bjorlin, Meta’s vice president of infrastructure hardware: “They commented that a large training cluster could be as much as 6 Megawatts today. They said that these training clusters would be 64 Megawatts in the future”; the figures are the post’s account of the talk, and neither is on a slide the post reproduces nor in any recording or program found on 5 October 2026) (SemiAnalysis sells subscriptions, consulting and its own models of chip, memory and datacenter supply into the markets it measures; held whole in the Library since Sourcing’s capture of 5 October 2026). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Megawatt.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/megawatt (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-megawatt-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Megawatt}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/megawatt},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}