How Much Electricity Does a 100 Gigawatt AI Cluster Use?

Leopold Aschenbrenner says a 100 gigawatt AI cluster uses over 20 percent of United States electricity production. He calls 100 gigawatts pretty wild, and he says the scale is still pretty doable with natural gas.

A 10 gigawatt training cluster is quite doable, at a few percent of United States natural gas production. Inference on top of the training cluster uses more power and pushes the total toward 100 gigawatts. The easy way to get power would be buying an aluminum smelting plant and replacing the plant with a data center. Long-term power contracts are locked in, and people resist the switch, so companies are building new power.

Aschenbrenner says the shift gets really interesting when the plan is no longer new plants and the power goes to artificial general intelligence. He says it is incredibly important that the clusters are in the United States.