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Clash of the titans: Here are the biggest AI data center projects

Hyperion, Colossus, Prometheus, and Stargate. Our guide to the GPUs and gigawatts that make up the largest AI infrastructure projects in the industry.

Jon Keegan

Nvidia’s $100 billion megadeal with OpenAI to build massive AI data centers filled with Nvidia GPUs sets a new threshold for unprecedented computing power: the plan describes a partnership to build a staggering 10 gigawatts of computing power.

Gigawatts — a million kilowatts — is a metric increasingly used as a yardstick to measure the size of AI infrastructure projects like these. According to the Department of Energy, in 2022 the average annual amount of energy used by a residential home was 10,791 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Based on this figure, 10 gigawatts is roughly enough power to supply 8 million homes for a day.

The other key attribute of these titanic data centers is how many thousands of pricey GPUs are filling their racks to the ceiling. Here’s how the biggest-profile projects from the top players stack up:

There are a lot of billions of dollars and gigawatts flying around. Here’s a guide to the biggest AI data center projects underway.

Nvidia and OpenAI partnership

Nvidia says it will invest as much as $100 billion into OpenAI as part of an unprecedented 10-gigawatt data center buildout. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the project would be “the biggest AI infrastructure project in history.” Reuters reports that the deal gives Nvidia nonvoting shares for its staged investment in OpenAI, and OpenAI in turn uses that money to purchase the GPUs from Nvidia. Final details of the plan are yet to be announced.

Location: ???
Power: 10 gigawatts
GPUs: 4 million to 5 million
Value: $100 billion

OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank - “Stargate”

Stargate is the $500 billion OpenAI partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a massive 4.5-gigawatt AI data center. Recent reports have described trouble with the partnership, and plans may be scaled back.

Location: Abilene, Texas (the first of several planned facilities)
Power: 4.5 gigawatts
GPUs: 2 million
Value: $500 billion (over four years)

Meta - “Hyperion”

Meta’s massive city-sized data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is known as Hyperion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it will scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years.

Location: Richland Parish, Louisiana
Power: Scaling up to 5 gigawatts
GPUs: ???
Value: $10 billion... or is it $50 billion?

Meta - “Prometheus”

Meta is also building Prometheus, a data center in New Albany, Ohio, due to come online next year. It’s the first of the “titan clusters” that Meta has planned to power its mission to achieve “superintelligence.”

Location: New Albany, Ohio
Power: 1 gigawatt “plus”
GPUs: 500,000 (estimated)
Value: ???

xAI - “Colossus”

Built in a record 122 days, Colossus, a data center in South Memphis, Tennessee, was the first to reach 1 megawatt of computing power. It’s used to train and run xAI CEO Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Watchdog groups have taken issue with methane spewing from 35 portable gas turbines, allowed without permits using a loophole.

Location: South Memphis, Tennessee
Power: 300 megawatts
GPUs: 230,000
Value: $3 billion (estimated)

xAI - “Colossus II”

colossus-2 — Inside the Colossus II data center (@elonmusk on X)

Colossus II is the second Memphis-area data center currently under construction. Musk said it will use 550,000 GPUs.

Location: South Memphis, Tennessee
Power: 1 gigawatt
GPUs: 550,000
Value: ???

Amazon, Anthropic - “Project Rainier”

Amazon Project Rainier — Amazon’s Project Rainier (Amazon)

Running on Amazon’s custom Trainium 2 chips, Project Rainier is a cluster of 30 data centers at one site in Indiana. It’s used to power Amazon partner Anthropic’s AI services.

Location: St. Joseph County, Indiana
Power: 2.2 gigawatts
GPUs: “Hundreds of thousands”
Value: $11 billion

Microsoft - “Fairwater”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Fairwater, a new Wisconsin data center, “a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times.” 90% of the facility will use a “state-of-the-art closed-loop liquid cooling system” that greatly reduces its water use.

FAIRWATER OMB-Image-1-Datacenter — Microsoft’s “Fairwater” data center (Microsoft)

Location: Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Power: ???
GPUs: “Hundreds of thousands”
Value: Initial $3.3 billion; adding a $4 billion expansion

Update (September 23): Corrected definition of gigawatts as a million kilowatts, not a thousand kilowatts.

Rani Molla5h

Meta launches federal super PAC to fight state AI policy proposals

Meta has launched a federal super PAC called the American Technology Excellence Project, spending “tens of millions” of dollars to fight what it considers “onerous AI and tech policy bills across the country,” Axios reports. Last month, Meta launched a California super PAC to back pro-AI candidates in the state.

Silicon Valley in general has been rushing behind pro-AI PACs, seeking to fight proposals like Senator Mark Kelly’s that would force AI companies to foot some of the bill for the societal ills they cause.

Exclusive: Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation

Rani Molla5h

Wedbush: Nvidia investment in OpenAI is a “watershed moment”

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI says a lot of things about the importance of the moment we’re in. It’s a “watershed moment,” a “Ryder Cup moment,” and a “validation sign that the AI Arms Race is heating up among Big Tech firms.” In a note this morning, Ives wrote:

“We believe the AI Revolution is now heading into its next stage of growth as the tidal wave of Big Tech capex spending coupled by enterprise use cases now exploding across verticals is creating a number of AI winners in the tech world. The last few months we have seen a major validation moment for our AI Revolution bull thesis as the cloud stalwarts Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are leading the charge on this unprecedented spending cycle. Nvidia’s recent robust earnings and demand commentary from the Godfather of AI Jensen speaks to the evolution of AI spend now spreading beyond Big Tech to governments, enterprises, energy capacity, and overall infrastructure build outs around the globe.”

He does not consider it a bubble — or at least not yet. “While there are worries about an ‘AI Bubble’ and stretched valuations we continue to view this as a 1996 Moment for the Tech World and NOT a 1999 Moment,” Ives wrote, suggesting the situation is more like the early days of the internet, when there was a lot of investment in internet companies and a lot of experimentation — and when the dot-com bubble bursting was still a few years off.

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Ives raises Apple price target to Wall Street high of $310, citing a “real upgrade cycle” for iPhones

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives raised his Apple price target to $310 from $270 thanks to “early strong demand signs” for the iPhone 17, which he says is tracking 10% to 15% ahead of the iPhone 16 at this point.

That $310 price target is the highest among Wall Street analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Ives said the Street’s estimate of about 230 million iPhone unit sales for Apple’s upcoming fiscal year is conservative and instead thinks the company is on track to sell 240 million to 250 million units in FY26. Ives wrote:

“The combination of a pent-up consumer upgrade cycle with our estimates of 315 million of 1.5 billion iPhones globally not upgrading their iPhones in the last 4 years, coupled with some design changes/enhancements have been the magical formula out of the gates.”

Sherwood News reported last week that redesigned iPhone models, which went on sale Friday, are seeing more interest than they have in three years — a phenomenon we speculate might have less to do with the iPhone itself and more to do with a natural upgrade cycle, as the rush of phones purchased in 2020 and 2021 become obsolete.

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Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are among the US tech companies most affected by Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee

President Trump’s proclamation on Friday charging a new $100,000 fee for high-skilled tech visas has sent the country’s biggest tech companies scrambling. Firms warned their H-1B workers not to travel outside the US and are weighing what the steep cost could mean for future hiring, given their heavy reliance on the program to bring in top talent.

Data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services shows the top beneficiaries of H-1B visas this year include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google.

So far, the leaders of these tech companies, many of whom recently attended a White House dinner praising the president, have been mum on the new fee, except for Netflix’s Reed Hastings. He wrote on X that he considers it a “great solution.”

“It will mean H1-B is used just for very high-value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed, and more certainty for those jobs,” he said. Netflix is not among the top 100 beneficiaries of H-1B visas this year.