Etymology

gigawatt

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Today it means: One thousand million (10⁹) watts, an amount of power large enough to power such things as a midsize town or several small ones. (Consuming 1 gigawatt during a duration of 1 hour consumes 1 gigawatt-hour of energy.) Full definition →

First used mid-2020sEnglish watt ← Ancient Greek γίγας (gígas)
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The story

  1. Ancient GreekΓίγας (Gígas)
  2. Ancient Greekγίγας (gígas)
  3. Englishgiga-
  4. EnglishWatt
  5. Englishwatt
  6. English todaygigawatt

From giga- + watt.

First known use, by meaning

  • mid-2020s The amount of data center capacity or amount of compute that this amount of power can provide under the current technological state of the art (PUE, clock speed, etc).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.