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How Do You Measure A.I. Firms’ Gargantuan Energy Plans? In ‘Bragawatts.’

One way for a company to stand out — or to intimidate the competition — is to boast, often without evidence, about how much power it has access to.

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Jackson Gibbs

By

Erin Griffith

April 26, 2026,

5:00 a.m. ET

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The artificial intelligence boom has one big thing holding it back: energy. A.I. companies rely on power-hungry data centers to train their models, and they need gigawatts of power to keep them humming.

With only so much energy to go around and only so much funding to build new infrastructure, it’s fiercely competitive out there. The biggest A.I. companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic, are locked in a white-knuckled race to secure the most money and announce the biggest infrastructure deals. One way for a company to stand out — or to intimidate the competition — is to boast about how much power it has access to for these ventures.

Critics call such infrastructure projects bragawatts. They’re often announced to much fanfare, with companies boasting about the number of gigawatts of energy they will one day produce. Some executives invoke the term as a form of trash talking.

My energy project is real. My competitor’s? Bragawatts.

How it’s pronounced

/brăg-ə-wät/

The term started more than a decade ago in the energy industry, used to describe power from a solar or wind project that had no chance of being built. Last year, A.I. executives began boasting with increasing boldness about their plans. A.I. watchers, including Waldemar Szlezak, the head of infrastructure at the private equity firm KKR, repurposed the term

in a Financial Times column

imploring investors to look past the A.I. hype and focus on the reality of today’s power grid. Since then, the term has popped up in

media headlines

,

analyst reports

and on

social media

, typically with a healthy dose of skepticism about how quickly such projects can realistically be built.

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