The artificial intelligence boom has one big thing holding it back: energy. A.I. companies rely on power-hungry data centers to train their models, and they need gigawatts of power to keep them humming.
With only so much energy to go around and only so much funding to build new infrastructure, it’s fiercely competitive out there. The biggest A.I. companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic, are locked in a white-knuckled race to secure the most money and announce the biggest infrastructure deals. One way for a company to stand out — or to intimidate the competition — is to boast about how much power it has access to for these ventures.
Critics call such infrastructure projects bragawatts. They’re often announced to much fanfare, with companies boasting about the number of gigawatts of energy they will one day produce. Some executives invoke the term as a form of trash talking. My energy project is real. My competitor’s? Bragawatts.
How it’s pronounced
/brăg-ə-wät/
The term started more than a decade ago in the energy industry, used to describe power from a solar or wind project that had no chance of being built. Last year, A.I. executives began boasting with increasing boldness about their plans. A.I. watchers, including Waldemar Szlezak, the head of infrastructure at the private equity firm KKR, repurposed the term in a Financial Times column imploring investors to look past the A.I. hype and focus on the reality of today’s power grid. Since then, the term has popped up in media headlines, analyst reports and on social media, typically with a healthy dose of skepticism about how quickly such projects can realistically be built.
The numbers being announced are staggering. Nvidia estimated that as much as $4 trillion would be spent on A.I. infrastructure this decade. OpenAI said it had committed to spend $1.4 trillion to build data centers around the world. (It later lowered that target to a mere $600 billion.)
Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a supply chain services firm, said that projects highlighting a gigawatt or more of energy are the most likely to be bragawatts.
“That’s where you can have some scratching of the heads,” he said.
Likewise for any infrastructure projects announced by companies that haven’t already secured the land to build the project, he noted. “That’s definitely the braganomics.”
The biggest tech companies are hoovering up gigawatts, but demand far outstrips capacity.
Things are ramping up so quickly that A.I. companies are concerned they will run out of computing capacity on earth. So they’re looking to the heavens. Google, SpaceX and others have begun work on projects to create data centers in space, where they will have nonstop sun for solar panels and no fights with locals who don’t want one in their backyard. Experts say data centers in space do not make financial sense today.
In some ways, it doesn’t matter how realistic a company’s projects and plans are. The point is to get a splashy headline, gin up hype, excite investors and project forward momentum. The perception of dominance is almost as good as the real thing.
Erin Griffith covers tech companies, start-ups and the culture of Silicon Valley from San Francisco.
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