How The Nation's Power Grid Will Handle The $2.5 Trillion A.I. Boom

ByChristopher Helman,

Forbes Staff.

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etween now and 2030, the giants of A.I. like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta aim to more than double the computing power dedicated to growing and operating their non-human minds. They currently use about 40 gigawatts of power, enough for 30 million homes.

The cost of this ambition will be astronomical — about $50 billion per gigawatt of computing power built for a total of $2.5 trillion over the next five years alone. Roughly 80% of that will go to buy GPUs made by the likes of Nvidia and AMD; the rest — some $500 billion — will provide the energy via new power plants and transmission lines.