I don’t think that 1MW is something older datacenters consumed. Unless you are talking about a single rack in a corporate server room.

It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.

Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.

You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.

With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.

[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...

[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...

You are confusing MW with MWh and apparently kWh.

A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.

1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.

A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.

>However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that Agate LLC is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.

The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.

> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...

https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...

> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]

Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.

But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.

1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...

> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use

Not even close to a true statement.

EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].

According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.

For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much.

If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).

It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.

Okay. And? Data centers are aggregating the demand of nationwide consumption. They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.

Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.

It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.

> They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.

Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.

> Attacking them for size

I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.

I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.

> Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached.

https://datacenters.google/efficiency/

> If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind. >

Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.

According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.

We know that by and large the biggest new proposed datacentres aren't intended to aggregate existing capacity but to add to it. Adding 26GW spread across three datacentres no doubt is more efficient than spreading 26GW across 26 or 260 new datacentres. But anything like 100GW or 400GW of total extra datacentre capacity, in the US alone https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/02/insid... , is enough of an increase that the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all, and some (I assume) relatively modest efficiency gains from taking datacentre aggregation to the next level surely won't have a decisive impact on that. We're certainly beyond the point where such questions are largely just a problem for the investors (or even for Americans), especially when it turns out that, whoops, the DCs are going to be powered by finite, highly-dispatchable and CO_2-emitting natural gas after all, not baseload nuclear stations.

Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)

And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.

> the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all

If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.

The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.

If built out. A single DC of this scale is driving Oracle, a giant company, so bankrupt their bonds have been downgraded to junk status and they're claiming force majeure to get out of paying their debts.

> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.

I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.

This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).

It’s not ‘spare goes to training’. These data centres are training first. Inference is really rather efficient, so not why datacenters are so big.

If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we can have more electricity at lower prices when we're ready

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...

> [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...

For those who haven't clicked through, that article mentions a 9GW datacentre planned for Utah by Kevin O'Leary's company as well as a 10GW datacentre planned for Ohio by Softbank https://apnews.com/article/ai-data-center-ohio-uranium-enric... and Facebook's planned 7GW data centre in Louisiana https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... , all largely to be gas-powered it seems.

> 1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.

There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.

Do you have any in mind? How many?

Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.

I remember one in the Midwest was growing past that.

Even for smaller sites, 1-2 MW would have been very small.

1-2MW is like one or two rows of older non-GPU machines, it can't be called a DC.

That's what many data centers look like for a mid/large non-tech company that in-houses their datacenter operations. They're often otherwise a "real" datacenter with UPS, backup generators, multiple tier-1 carriers, chillers, raised floors /w hot/cold aisles, etc.

You see it less now since the shift to the cloud, but in the 00s this stuff was everywhere.