The Government Just Ordered a 1 Gigawatt Datacenter and Won't Tell You What That Means

There is a particular flavor of executive order that reads like a Tom Clancy novel got drunk and started citing IEEE standards. The one that dropped January 14th is that flavor.

The short version: the federal government has ordered that gigawatt-scale AI datacenter sites be identified on US soil by March 15th. The sites must be co-located with their own energy sources — fission, fusion, geothermal, hydrothermal, whatever can actually feed the thing. Not grid power. Not a utility hookup. The project developer brings the juice.

Take a second with the unit here. A gigawatt. Microsoft bought Three Mile Island last year — the whole plant, decommissioned nuclear facility, full acquisition — and at operational capacity it doesn't clear one gigawatt. That's the unit of one site, under this order, identified in roughly sixty days.

GPT-4 probably ran on somewhere around 80 megawatts. Maybe a few hundred at peak, embedded in Azure's existing infrastructure across however many buildings across however many continents. The thing that changed the world and spawned a thousand LinkedIn posts about "prompt engineering" was running on less than a single large hospital campus.

Altman has been talking about 5 gigawatt datacenters. The Register ran a piece on it in September — the number sounds like a typo until you sit with it long enough for it to start sounding like the only logical conclusion. The executive order lands at one gigawatt, officially, on paper, as a target — and the gap between one and five is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the gap closes the same way every other gap in this story has closed, which is faster than anyone said it would and weirder than anyone planned.

For the current administration this is a national security posture. For whoever comes next it's probably a real estate play dressed in patriotic framing. The outputs are likely identical.

There's a version of this story where it's inspiring — the coordination required, the sheer audacity of treating energy infrastructure like a sprint deliverable, the implied belief that something on the other end of this is worth building toward. There's another version where it's just the largest capital expenditure in human history in service of a thing nobody has fully explained to the people funding it.

Both versions are probably true. They usually are.

Douglas Adams had a note about this somewhere. No spoilers. Read the book.