Clash of the titans: Here are the biggest AI data center projects

Nvidia’s $100 billion megadeal with OpenAI to build massive AI data centers filled with Nvidia GPUs sets a new threshold for unprecedented computing power: the plan describes a partnership to build a staggering 10 gigawatts of computing power.

Gigawatts — a million kilowatts — is a metric increasingly used as a yardstick to measure the scale of AI infrastructure and the energy consumed by projects like these. According to the Department of Energy, in 2022 the average annual amount of energy used by a residential home was 10,791 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Based on this figure, 10 gigawatts is roughly enough power to supply 8 million homes for a day.

The other key attribute of these titanic data centers is how many thousands of pricey GPUs are filling their racks to the ceiling. Here’s how the biggest-profile projects from the top players stack up:

There are a lot of billions of dollars and gigawatts flying around. Here’s a guide to the biggest AI data center projects underway.

Nvidia and OpenAI partnership

Nvidia says it will invest as much as $100 billion into OpenAI as part of an unprecedented 10-gigawatt data center buildout. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the project would be “the biggest AI infrastructure project in history.” Reuters reports that the deal gives Nvidia nonvoting shares for its staged investment in OpenAI, and OpenAI in turn uses that money to purchase the GPUs from Nvidia. Final details of the plan are yet to be announced.

• Location: ???

• Power: 10 gigawatts

• GPUs: 4 million to 5 million

• Value: $100 billion

OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank - “Stargate”

Stargate is the $500 billion OpenAI partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a series of massive AI data centers, totaling 5.5-gigawatts. The latest announcement expanded the number of locations for the facilities and puts the project ahead of schedule after earlier doubts had been surfaced around the timeline.

• Locations: Abilene, Texas; Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; Lordstown, Ohio; Milam County, Texas, undisclosed site in the Midwest.

• Power: 5.5 gigawatts

• GPUs: 2 million

• Value: $500 billion (over four years)

Meta - “Hyperion”

Meta’s massive city-sized data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is known as Hyperion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it will scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years.

• Location: Richland Parish, Louisiana

• Power: Scaling up to 5 gigawatts

• GPUs: ???

• Value: $10 billion... or is it $50 billion?

Meta - “Prometheus”

Meta is also building Prometheus, a data center in New Albany, Ohio, due to come online next year. It’s the first of the “titan clusters” that Meta has planned to power its mission to achieve “superintelligence.”

• Location: New Albany, Ohio

• Power: 1 gigawatt “plus”

• GPUs: 500,000 (estimated)

• Value: ???

xAI - “Colossus”

Built in a record 122 days, Colossus, a data center in South Memphis, Tennessee, was the first to reach 1 megawatt of computing power. It’s used to train and run xAI CEO Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Watchdog groups have taken issue with methane spewing from 35 portable gas turbines, allowed without permits using a loophole.

• Location: South Memphis, Tennessee

• Power: 300 megawatts

• GPUs: 230,000

• Value: $3 billion (estimated)

xAI - “Colossus II”

Colossus II is the second Memphis-area data center currently under construction. Musk said it will use 550,000 GPUs.

• Location: South Memphis, Tennessee

• Power: 1 gigawatt

• GPUs: 550,000

• Value: ???

Amazon, Anthropic - “Project Rainier”

Running on Amazon’s custom Trainium 2 chips, Project Rainier is a cluster of 30 data centers at one site in Indiana. It’s used to power Amazon partner Anthropic’s AI services.

• Location: St. Joseph County, Indiana

• Power: 2.2 gigawatts

• GPUs: “Hundreds of thousands”

• Value: $11 billion

Microsoft - “Fairwater”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Fairwater, a new Wisconsin data center, “a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times.” 90% of the facility will use a “state-of-the-art closed-loop liquid cooling system” that greatly reduces its water use.

• Location: Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

• Power: ???

• GPUs: “Hundreds of thousands”

• Value: Initial $3.3 billion; adding a $4 billion expansion

Update (September 23): Corrected definition of gigawatts as a million kilowatts, not a thousand kilowatts.

Update (September 24): Updated details about the Stargate project following a new announcement from OpenAI.