When Sam Altman talks about a 1GW AI data centre:

1GW over a month, released instantly, would be an 850 kiloton explosion.

A 1GW AI data centre uses as much energy as detonating ten 1-megaton H-bombs a year.

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October 19, 2025 - 12:31 UTC

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1GW is a decent-sized nuclear power station, just to power that data centre.

It's enough power for a city of 300,000 homes/a million people.
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The AI bubble will burst and crash the US economy before they get built.
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*Sam Altman voice* bombs! cool!
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Strewth, that’s a lot of energy. Do they say where it’s coming from?
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Ha ha nope GIVE ME A HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS and I will pull a bunch of new-build nuclear reactors out of Sam Altman's arse to prop up his crumbling hallucination engines
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I hear it almost enough power to travel back to the future.
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Grid Strategies forecast 60GW of AI data center in the USA by 2030:

www.cnbc.com/2025/10/17/ai-data-center-openai-gas-nuclear-renewable-utility.html

So that's 600 megatons of H-bombs expoding in 2030, or about 1500 megatons released between now and then.

All to power fucking chatbots.

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This is the energy budget of the AI bubble: a nuclear war every year, *just in the USA alone*—everyone else is *also* going all in on this self-destructive bullshit.

(Meanwhile, if you want a non-LLM chatbot, they've existed since the 1960s and can probably run on a smartwatch.)

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It's all nonsense and bullshit anyway, Altman lying through his teeth to keep the financial boat afloat a bit longer as usual. Conservatively, building 1 GW of compute capacity takes 2-3 years and around 30 billion dollars. @edzitron.com has an excellent, detailed breakdown in this article:
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The worst part is that it's probably accurate. While it is possible to run the models locally, it's much more convenient to just buy into a big company's model.
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1GW is the size of an average modern nuclear power reactor unit. So these centers require 60 nuke plants, or the equivalent of.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
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Our entire global civilization literally does not have the infrastructure or capability of generating, harnessing, and transporting this much power and dumping it all into AI monstrosities on the timescale required for this bubble not to collapse. The infrastructure just straight up doesn't exist.
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And ...

While the electricity could be produced without CO2 emissions, the heat is the heat. Most will get radiated to space, but I wonder if anyone has modeled how much will be retained. This is not to mention the need for freshwater for cooling, and resulting atmospheric vapor...
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the human brain uses about 20W, clearly we are on a completely wrong track
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So we will build dedicated power plants just to supply that energy - and generate more heat.
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Naah, the bubble will burst long before we build any new capacity to drive it. Bad news is, demand from the parrot factories will drive your electricity bill up long before we reach that point.
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True, but 1 GW still falls 0.21 GW short of what's required to send a DeLorean 30 years backwards or forwards in time.
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Why are they suddenly talking about this in power terms rather than some measure of compute capacity? I mean if someone invents a more energy efficient LLM (as if!), won’t that now look worse ie less GW?
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More efficient for running them already does exist, FWIW (the kit in question's just not good at training)
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Oh joy we can have more AI slop videos from the White House
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So we could power that data center by exploding a 1-megaton H-bomb every month and extract its entergy for the center? Well, at least it isn't emitting CO2! 😂
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