By Dan Rabb | BisNow
The massive data center facilities used by tech giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Meta have begun gobbling up far more energy than ever before, and they are approaching an inflection point.
The size of hyperscale data center campuses — measured in the amount of energy they consume — has grown quickly over the last decade from dozens of megawatts to hundreds. And as that growth accelerates, the world’s largest tech companies are reportedly looking for sites to deploy more than a gigawatt of capacity at a time.
One gigawatt is enough to provide a full year of power to nearly 900,000 households — about the size of a major city like Houston.
Driven by the need for computing power to support artificial intelligence, this represents a massive leap forward for a data center industry still grappling with how to deliver facilities a fraction of that size.
