Gigawatt Campus

A gigawatt campus is a data center site planned or built to draw 1,000 MW (1 GW) or more of grid power, usually as several buildings on one contiguous parcel. Roughly a decade ago a 30 MW facility counted as large; AI training demand has pushed announced hyperscale and neocloud projects past 1 GW, with several 1.2 GW and multi-gigawatt plans published in 2025–2026. At typical densities, 1 GW supports on the order of 500,000 or more accelerators, depending on the chip and cooling design. Such campuses need dedicated high-voltage substations, transmission upgrades and often on-site generation, so energization timelines of three to seven years are common and grid approval, not construction, is usually the bottleneck. Phase one capacities are often 50–100 MW, and headline gigawatt figures describe full build-out, not capacity delivered.