Rated electrical capacity is different from electricity actually consumed. Epoch AI's data-center estimate combines chip sales with maximum rated chip power, then applies an overhead factor for servers and supporting infrastructure. Source.
Its comparison of roughly 30 GW at the end of 2025, partly extrapolated, with New York State's peak demand describes a full-utilization capacity scenario. Real consumption depends on which equipment is deployed and how intensively it runs, while the overhead assumption varies by facility. Keeping power capacity separate from energy use prevents a striking comparison from becoming an unsupported claim about actual annual consumption.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
grounding — Tying a model's answers to checkable sources — retrieved documents, live data, tool results — instead of letting it answer from memory alone.
