Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers

Overview

Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers refers to the industry transition from data center campuses sized at a few megawatts to deployments measured in hundreds of megawatts and ultimately several gigawatts of IT power. This transition is driven primarily by the compute density requirements of AI training and inference workloads, where single GPU racks now draw hundreds of kilowatts and cluster-level deployments (such as NVIDIA's NVL72 Superpod) demand megawatt-class power delivery. The shift from megawatt to gigawatt scale is not merely a quantitative increase -- it represents a qualitative change that breaks assumptions embedded in every layer of data center facility design, from power delivery architecture and cooling systems to physical operations and telemetry.

At gigawatt scale, challenges that were manageable at smaller sizes become systemic. Power delivery requires new architectures (SSTs, HVDC, superconducting cables) because conventional transformer-UPS-PDU chains cannot physically fit within the facility or deliver sufficient power density to individual racks. Cooling systems must reject heat loads measured in hundreds of megawatts, making the choice of heat rejection technology and facility water supply temperature a multi-hundred-million-dollar decision with decades of locked-in consequences. Grid interconnection becomes a regulatory and infrastructure challenge, with individual developers submitting 15 GW of interconnection requests in the first 6 months of 2025 and concentrated loads creating systemic risks for regional grid stability. Physical operations exceed what human labor can safely and efficiently perform, driving the case for automation and robotics. Telemetry gaps between building management systems and tenant IT systems become critical because workload scheduling must coordinate with facility infrastructure at sub-second timescales. The 2025 OCP Global Summit Data Center Facility track was fundamentally organized around this transition, with every workstream update framed in terms of how existing standards and practices must evolve to address gigawatt-scale requirements.