The financing package stitched together for Meta’s humongous Hyperion data centre campus in Louisiana made Alphaville curious about just how much energy the new AI infrastructure will consume if it all comes online.
After all, massive new projects are being announced almost every week, in what even KKR’s digital infrastructure lead called a “bragawatts” phenomenon in MainFT on Monday.
The latest example is OpenAI on Thursday revealing plans for a 1+ gigawatt data centre hub in Michigan. Together with previously announced “Stargate” projects this brings the total to over 8 gigawatts — close to the 10 target it floated earlier this year. This will cost over $450bn over the next three years, according to the company that spends more on marketing and employee stock options than it makes in revenue.
So how many data centre projects have now been started or announced? Which ones will actually happen and which ones are fantasy? As Barclays noted last week, tracking “what is real vs. speculative is a full-time job”, but the bank has forced some poor sell-side plebs to at least tally all the announcements and collect some rudimentary details.
So what is the total so far? With OpenAI’s Michigan project they now total 46 gigawatts of computing power. Apologies for the virtual shouting, but this seems a bit mad.
