The financing package stitched together for Meta’s humongous Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana made Alphaville curious about just how much energy the new AI infrastructure will consume if it all comes online.
After all, massive new projects are being announced almost every week, in what even KKR’s digital infrastructure lead called a “bragawatts” phenomenon in MainFT on Monday.
The latest example is OpenAI on Thursday revealing plans for a 1+ gigawatt data centre hub in Michigan. Together with previously announced “Stargate” projects this brings the total to over 8 gigawatts — close to the 10 target it floated earlier this year. This will cost over $450 billion over the next three years, according to the company that spends more on marketing and employee stock options than it makes in revenue.
So how many data center projects have now been started or announced? Which ones will actually happen and which ones are fantasy? As Barclays noted last week, tracking “what is real vs. speculative is a full-time job”, but the bank has forced some poor sell-side plebs to at least tally all the announcements and collect some rudimentary details.
So what is the total so far? With OpenAI’s Michigan project they now total 46 gigawatts of computing power. Apologies for the virtual shouting, but this seems a bit mad.
These centers will cost $2.5 trillion to build, according to Barclays, to service an industry that still doesn’t turn a profit. But the maddest bit arguably is how much energy they will require once completed. Using Barclays’ 1.2 “Power Use Effectiveness” ratio, all these data centres — if they are all completed — would need 55.2 gigawatts of electricity to function at full capacity.
If we also use Barclays’ rule of thumb that 1 gigawatt can power over 800,000 American homes, it means that these data centres will consume as much energy as 44.2 million households — almost three times California’s entire housing stock.
Hyperscalers announced new data centres with 46GW of computing power
— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) November 4, 2025
>Cost: $2.5tn to build
>Require 55GW to 65GW of base load electricity
That's more than the total installed capacity of Poland or Sweden, 6 times New Zealand or Singapore, 50% of UKhttps://t.co/7j43C7QUwV pic.twitter.com/LrEfaKvpEk
