Frontier Data Center Power

Epoch AI tracks one number in this data insight: the power capacity of the single largest AI data center at any given time. It measures IT power, meaning the capacity available to chips, servers and other IT equipment, excluding cooling and other overhead, so these figures can read lower than the headline gigawatt numbers announced for whole campuses. Since mid-2024 that record has doubled roughly every ten months, about 2.3 times per year. The current holder is xAI's Colossus 2, at an estimated 950 MW.

The trend is fitted to only six record-setting moments, starting with Google's Papillion site at 237 MW in August 2024 and passing through the Amazon-owned New Carlisle campus used by Anthropic before Colossus 2 took the lead in June 2026. Epoch's 90% range for the doubling time is 8 to 13 months, and the authors say that interval should not be overly relied upon given the small sample. Individual estimates come mostly from satellite imagery, public disclosures and permits; Epoch says power figures are within about 1.4x and dates within six months 80% of the time, and coverage is concentrated in the US, so records elsewhere could be missing.

The forward look is where the uncertainty matters most. The two future facilities arriving by 2027 fall inside the trend's prediction interval, but the three projected for 2028, including Meta Hyperion and Microsoft's Fairwater site in Wisconsin, come in at roughly half the power the trend predicts. Epoch calls this at most weak evidence that growth will slow, and notes that those dates depend on construction timelines that could speed up or slip. A separate Epoch insight on the largest data center by compute follows the same kind of frontier measured in computing capacity rather than power.