The AI Compute Race Glossary MW

MW

What does “MW” mean?

MW

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

Where the record uses it

And 26 more in the record.

Sources that use it

  • Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025), read in full (the “engineering state” vs “lawyerly society” frame; the US offshore-wind ledger Wang dates to 2024, which its source, the Department of Energy’s Offshore Wind Market Report 2023 Edition, dates to 31 May 2023 — 42 MW operating, 932 under construction, 20,978 in permitting review; Cape Wind’s sixteen years of litigation; the only US nuclear plant built this century, “fifteen years and $30 billion”, the expected cost of the eleven reactors China’s nuclear authority approved in August 2024, ch. 2, p. 30, his note citing Bloomberg of 20 August 2024; the nuclear-powered Meta data center halted by a rare species of bee near the site, ch. 6, p. 203, his note citing the Financial Times of 4 November 2024; China’s 76 GW of wind installed in 2023 to America’s six; “the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight” and “rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China”; Nicholas Bagley’s “The Procedure Fetish” as Wang quotes it, Bagley’s word “available” dropped from “ventilate every available option” and his hypothetical extreme of a spectrum given as what the federal process requires; the book quotes Bagley’s own text from the article’s row; technology as tools, blueprints and process knowledge, the last existing “mostly in people’s heads” and embodied by an experienced workforce, ch. 3, with the NNSA’s $69 million relearning of Fogbank as the American cautionary tale, p. 74; the munitions asymmetry — nearly 1,800 commercial ships under construction in China to five in the United States in 2022, ch. 6, p. 204, his note citing the Congressional Research Service’s report on U.S. commercial shipbuilding of 15 November 2023, and UNIDO’s 45 percent of world industrial capacity by 2030, pp. 204–206, a forecast his notes do not source — and “algorithms alone will never win a battle”; “The United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and all other high-income states combined add up to 38 percent of capacity”, the sentence after the UNIDO forecast; “In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month”, p. 204, his note giving about 7,000 Ukrainian shells a day against 14,400 American shells a month from the New York Times of 29 May 2024 and Bloomberg of 7 June 2024; the Introduction: “For six years, I lived through a period of economic dynamism that gave way to smothering political repressiveness … I tracked the expanding web of US restrictions on Chinese tech companies, as well as their struggle to escape from American restraints”; the question closing the paragraph before the shipbuilding figures, ch. 6: “Which would you rather have: software or hardware?”; the full text read carries no page breaks, and the pages given are those its endnotes print for each noted passage; on Cape Wind, ch. 2: “the lawyerly society is great at protecting the wealthy”; on the controls: “scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them” (ch. 6, Fortress China); ch. 2: by 2025 China had caught up with the United States in the number of nuclear plants, fifty-five to fifty-four, with thirty-one under construction against America’s one; ch. 6: “American companies are not so much constrained on computing power as they are on electrical power” and “what China lacks in technological sophistication, it might make up for in electrical power”; ch. 6: “They ignored Beijing’s beseeching to buy from domestic vendors for the simple reason that Chinese technologies were not good enough”; ch. 6: “In 2024, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization forecast that China will have 45 percent of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030”). In the Sources
  • AEP Ohio, “New process advances 5.6 GW of data center projects,” 13 February 2026 (the page’s own title is “AEP Ohio Updates PUCO on Data Center Load: Figures Show Tariff is Working”; its figures as of 12 February 2026: of about 30,000 MW requested before the tariff, “13,022.7 MW asked and paid for a study,” 5,642 MW signed after the tariff took effect beside “12,219 MW of data center contracts signed before the tariff went into effect,” 17,861 MW in all “scheduled to come online progressively through 2035”) In the Sources
  • AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN, “AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN Expand Saudi Arabia’s AI Infrastructure as AMD Instinct Systems Go Live,” GlobeNewswire, Riyadh, 31 August 2026 (AMD Instinct MI355X infrastructure “now live in Saudi Arabia and serving HUMAIN customers in the Kingdom and beyond”, with no site, data center or capacity named; up to 250 MW of MI400-series infrastructure, its deployment “planned to begin in 2027”; read on 27 September 2026 by the close sweep). In the Sources
  • BDx Data Centers, “BDx Breaks Ground on 640MW AI Data Center in West Java, Backed by 845MVA of Secured Grid Power,” press release, 22 September 2026 (“BDx Data Centers (“BDx”) today broke ground on AI Campus 2 (CGK4), a 640MW AI data center campus in Jatiluhur, West Java, Indonesia”; “Dedi Mulyadi, Governor of West Java, and Saepul Bahri Binzein, Regent of Purwakarta, attended the groundbreaking ceremony”; “Construction has begun on Building 1, the first of six planned buildings at the site”; “Building 1 will deliver 120MW of IT capacity in phases, with the first contracted phase expected to enter service in early 2027”; the release does not say whether the 640 MW is IT load, and says nothing of an environmental assessment or a building approval). In the Sources
  • Constellation Energy, “Google and Constellation Announce Landmark Agreement to Bring 890 MW of New Nuclear Capacity to PJM Grid as Part of Long-Term Power Deal,” press release, 6 October 2026 (“The 20-year power purchase agreement will enable investments in new equipment and technology at 11 Constellation-owned nuclear units in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey”; “with the first uprate expected to be delivered by 2028”; the agreement “represents more than $4.3 billion of new investment by Constellation”, its chief executive saying the collaboration “can serve as a model” of investment “funded by private entities”; “the companies entered into a 15-year energy supply agreement for an additional 2,700 MWs in PJM’s fleet”; the release states no sum of the two, and the 3.59 gigawatts of press reports is a sum no company document states) In the Sources

And 146 more: search the Sources.

Related terms

From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.

How to cite this page

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

BibTeX

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

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