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US AI Data Center Electricity Timeline 2010-2026

US data centers used about 192 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 (4.7% of national electricity), per Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. LBNL's 2025 Upd…

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GHOST DEMAND & RECORD FOREC…

Ghost Demand, Texas Scrutiny and Record EIA Forecasts

National data-center interconnection requests topped 700 GW - over ten times actual US data-center consumption. Texas's PUCT published a draft SB6 rule requiring 75 MW+…

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GIGAWATT-SCALE CAMPUSES

Gigawatt-Scale AI Campuses Become the New Normal

Hyperscalers and ventures like OpenAI's Stargate program announced campuses sized in the hundreds of megawatts to multiple gigawatts. Texas signed Senate Bill 6 in June…

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NUCLEAR POWER DEALS

Big Tech Signs Nuclear Power Deals

Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement tied to Constellation's restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 (Crane Clean Energy Center, 835 MW). Google, Amazon and M…

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ELECTRICITY BECOMES A NAMED…

LBNL Names Data Centers as a Demand-Growth Driver

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published its December 2024 Data Center Energy Usage Report, estimating 2023 consumption at 176 TWh (4.4%) and projecting 6.7%-12%…

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THE GPU BUILDOUT ACCELERATES

The GPU Buildout Accelerates

Following ChatGPT's 2022 debut, demand for advanced AI accelerators grew rapidly. NVIDIA became the central supplier of AI training and inference hardware as hyperscaler…

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CHATGPT'S PUBLIC LAUNCH

ChatGPT Triggers Mass Consumer Adoption

ChatGPT's November 2022 public launch drove explosive consumer awareness of generative AI, followed immediately by enterprise investment across nearly every major techno…

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TRANSFORMERS ARRIVE

"Attention Is All You Need" Introduces the Transformer

Google researchers published the transformer architecture, the technical foundation for nearly every modern large language model - a prerequisite for the compute race th…

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GPU DEEP LEARNING PROVEN

AlexNet Shows GPU-Accelerated Deep Learning Works

AlexNet demonstrated a major leap in computer-vision accuracy by training a deep neural network on GPUs rather than CPUs at the ImageNet competition - trained on just tw…

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THE CLOUD ERA

The Cloud Era Expands Data-Center Electricity Demand

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google rapidly expanded US hyperscale cloud infrastructure for enterprise migration, streaming and mobile internet growth - a full dec…

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