Gigawatt

A gigawatt (GW) is an international standard unit used to measure power, which represents the instantaneous rate at which electrical energy is generated or consumed. The base unit of power is the watt (W), and one gigawatt equals one billion watts (10⁹ W). Because of its scale, the gigawatt unit is typically used to describe the installed capacity of large power plants or the peak load of national and regional power grids.

In the past, data center power demand was usually measured in megawatts (MW). However, with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence—particularly the training and inference of large language models (LLMs)—the computational capability of a single machine is no longer sufficient. Instead, AI workloads now require the coordinated operation of tens or even hundreds of thousands of GPUs simultaneously, dramatically increasing overall power consumption and pushing data center scale to new levels.

According to McKinsey, in order to meet the continued growth in data center demand, power capacity will need to expand from tens of megawatts to hundreds of megawatts, and in some cases, even reach the gigawatt scale.

Meanwhile, Deloitte’s AI infrastructure research projects that electricity demand from AI data centers in the United States will surge from 4 GW in 2024 to 123 GW by 2035, representing growth of more than 30 times within just over a decade.

This signals that AI development is entering a new phase defined by gigawatt-scale power infrastructure. The focus is no longer solely on increasing the number of GPUs, but on how to operate large GPU clusters efficiently, sustainably, and reliably over long periods of time, enabling continuous AI innovation at scale.

Related Reading: GIGABYTE AI Factory Solutions

To help illustrate different orders of magnitude in power measurement, electrical systems use standardized metric prefixes such as kilo, mega, giga, and tera. The relationships between these units are as follows:

．Watt (W) = 1 W
．Kilowatt (kW) = 1,000 W (10³)
．Megawatt (MW) = 1,000,000 W (10⁶)
．Gigawatt (GW) = 1,000,000,000 W (10⁹)
．Terawatt (TW) = 1,000,000,000,000 W (10¹²)

As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications continue to scale rapidly, bringing unprecedented challenges in power delivery and thermal management, GIGABYTE delivers end-to-end, enterprise-grade data center solutions. These services span the entire lifecycle, from early-stage consultation and architectural design to system deployment, validation, and long-term operations. By integrating server hardware, system platforms, power infrastructure, and advanced cooling technologies, GIGABYTE enables organizations to achieve high-density computing while maintaining performance, stability, and sustainability.

On the power side, GIGABYTE focuses on optimizing the overall electrical architecture of the data center, including power distribution, real-time monitoring, and redundancy design. Combined with intelligent power management mechanisms, these capabilities improve energy efficiency while ensuring stable operation under sustained high workloads, allowing data centers to reliably support long-duration, high-power AI training and inference tasks.

From a thermal perspective, GIGABYTE adopts advanced solutions such as liquid cooling and immersion cooling, and can design and deploy complete cooling pipelines and heat exchange systems tailored to specific data center requirements. By overcoming the physical limitations of traditional air cooling, these approaches significantly improve cooling efficiency, reduce overall power consumption, enhance data center PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), and ensure that server chips can operate stably at high utilization levels—fully unlocking their maximum computational performance.