Compute & chips
Why it matters
A gigawatt is a unit of power, how fast energy is used. As a rough sense of scale, it is the output of a large power station, which is why a data center measured in gigawatts is a story about energy as much as computing.
Quoting power instead of chips makes sense because chips keep changing while the power and cooling limit how many can run. When you see a gigawatt figure, look for its date and whether it is power in use today or a planned total.
Related terms
- AI data center
- A building full of GPUs, power and cooling, used to train and run AI models. Colossus is xAI's.
- Orbital compute
- Running AI computers on satellites instead of on the ground, powered by sunlight. Musk's memo at the February 2, 2026 xAI acquisition described it as a main aim of the merger.
- GPU
- A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a chip first built to speed up graphics. Its strength at parallel math also makes it the main chip for training and running AI models, which is why AI clusters are counted in GPUs.