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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

9/23/25 9:51AM

Updated 9/24/25 12:02PM

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 scale of AI infrastructure and the energy consumed by 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 series of massive AI data centers, totaling 5.5-gigawatts. The latest announcement expanded the number of locations for the facilities and puts the project ahead of schedule after earlier doubts had been surfaced around the timeline.

Locations: Abilene, Texas; Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; Lordstown, Ohio; Milam County, Texas, undisclosed site in the Midwest.
Power: 5.5 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 Trainium2 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.

Update (September 24): Updated details about the Stargate project following a new announcement from OpenAI.

Jon Keegan1h

Pentagon adds xAI’s Grok to its AI platform

Grok is going to war.

Today the Pentagon announced that xAI’s controversial Grok chatbot will be added to GenAI.mil, the Department of Defense’s “bespoke AI platform.”

Launched earlier this month, GenAI.mil joins Google’s Gemini on the platform, which the Pentagon says will usher in an “AI-driven culture change” at the agency.

Federal workers have had access to Grok since the White House ordered the chatbot added to the GSA’s approved AI vendor list in August.

xAI has had some embarrassing episodes as it scrambles to monetize Grok, after spending billions on its Colossus data centers. Just this summer, several examples emerged of Grok responding to user queries with antisemitic tropes, and even praising Hitler.

The War Department to Expand AI Arsenal on GenAI.mil With xAI

Launched earlier this month, GenAI.mil joins Google’s Gemini on the platform, which the Pentagon says will usher in an “AI-driven culture change” at the agency.

Federal workers have had access to Grok since the White House ordered the chatbot added to the GSA’s approved AI vendor list in August.

Jon Keegan6h

Alphabet acquires data center company Intersect for $4.75 billion

Google parent Alphabet announced a deal to acquire data center and energy infrastructure builder Intersect. Alphabet already held a minority stake and a partnership with the company. The acquisition is for $4.75 billion in cash.

According to Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai: “Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive US innovation and leadership. We look forward to welcoming Sheldon and the Intersect team.”

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

Alphabet Announces Agreement to Acquire Intersect to Advance U.S. Energy Innovation

Alphabet Is ‘Most Valuable Company’ on AI Strength, Moffett Says

Rani Molla7h

Tesla might get to a 1,000 Robotaxis in the Bay Area this year after all

Tesla has registered 1,655 ride-hailing vehicles in California, up from just 28 when it launched the service in August, according to California Public Utilities Commission data cited by Business Insider. That growth suggests Tesla — which currently has about 130 Robotaxis operating with a driver using Full Self-Driving in the Bay Area — could realistically hit CEO Elon Musk’s target of 1,000 vehicles in the region by the end of the year.

Registered vehicles aren’t the same as an active fleet, but the increase signals that Tesla is gearing up for significant expansion.

Google’s Waymo remains in the lead, with nearly 2,000 driverless vehicles registered across its two California markets, including more than 1,000 operating in the Bay Area and 700 in Los Angeles.

It’s less clear whether Tesla can meet Musk’s other goals, including deploying 500 Robotaxis in Austin, where just 32 vehicles are currently operating, or removing safety monitors by year’s end. Only two of those Austin vehicles are currently testing without drivers.

Tesla has registered more than 1,000 new vehicles for its 'Robotaxi' fleet in California in just a few months

Registered vehicles aren’t the same as an active fleet, but the increase signals that Tesla is gearing up for significant expansion.

Google’s Waymo remains in the lead, with nearly 2,000 driverless vehicles registered across its two California markets, including more than 1,000 operating in the Bay Area and 700 in Los Angeles.

Jon Keegan7h

Activists claim to have scraped most of Spotify, planning release

An activist archiving group claims they have scraped a large part of Spotify’s library of music.

Anna’s Archive, a self-described “open source search engine for shadow libraries” announced in a blog post that the pirated Spotify files will be a “preservation archive,” meant to archive the snapshot of music for future generations.

Anna’s Archive says they have scraped 86 million tracks. Spotify says their platform hosts over 100 million tracks. The group has already released a database of metadata from Spotify’s collections, having reportedly scraped 256 million rows’ worth, per Billboard, with plans to release music files later down the line.

Such a large corpus of publicly available music data would be a goldmine to AI companies, looking for fresh data to train their models. Spotify told Billboard that it is actively investigating the incident.

Spotify Music Library Scraped by Pirate Activist Group

Rani Molla10h

In the absence of official statistics, Bloomberg attempted to tally the number of US deaths linked to crashes in which Tesla’s door functionality may have impeded escape or rescue. The analysis identified “at least 15 deaths in a dozen incidents over the past decade in which occupants or rescuers were unable to open the doors of a Tesla that had crashed and caught fire.”

In September, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into whether door issues in certain Tesla vehicles can prevent emergency access, following a separate Bloomberg report.