gigawatt

plural gigawatts · alternative giga-watt · alternative alternative pronunciation spelling jigawatt

1. 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.)

   Holonyms: TW, terawatt < PW, petawatt

   4 more examples

   Meronyms: mW, milliwatt < W, watt < kW, kilowatt < MW, megawatt

   In the 2020s, the race for AI data centers has Big Tech searching for ways to add multiple gigawatts of additional grid capacity to a regional power grid.

   In a famous movie about time travel, the mad scientist tells the teenage hero that the time machine requires 1.21 gigawatts of power to operate.

   The European Union's string of record-setting solar power deployment is on track to come to an end this year as demand wanes for rooftop solar panels due to lower wholesale electricity prices. Solar power additions are set to contract 1.4% in the EU, the first annual dip since 2016, according to a report from industry group Solar Power Europe. While new additions are still at historically high levels, it shows the impact on growth of saturated solar power markets where prices regularly dip below zero during the sunniest parts of the year. Overall, the EU is on track to add 64.2 gigawatts of new capacity, according to the industry group. That view contrasts with analysis from BloombergNEF that sees slight growth this year in the bloc.

   2025 July 24, Will Mathis, “Europe's Solar Power Growth Set to Dip for First Time Since 2016”, in BloombergNEF, archived from the original on 24 Jul 2025

2. metonymicallyThe 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).First known use mid-2020s

   a gigawatt of compute

   1 more example

   “We’re gonna need stadiums full of electricians, heavy equipment operators, ironworkers, HVAC technicians,” Dwarkesh Patel and Romeo Dean, AI-industry analysts, wrote recently. Large-scale data-center build-outs may already be reshaping America’s energy systems. OpenAI has announced that it intends to build at least 30 gigawatts’ worth of data centers—more power than all of New England requires on even the hottest day—and CEO Sam Altman has said he’d eventually like to build a gigawatt of AI infrastructure every week. Other major tech firms have similar ambitions.

   2025 October 30, Matteo Wong, Charlie Warzel, “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens. The U.S. is becoming an Nvidia-state”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 30 Oct 2025