When OpenAI’s Sam Altman was asked by Tyler Cowen in a recent interivew, “If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would that one thing be?” Altman pointedly answered “electrons.” Coming from one of the leading voices driving the ecosystem of energy, data centers, and GPUs supporting the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), his answer says it all. Energy is both the enabler and the bottleneck for AI’s growth.
Current and future access to gigawatts of power is therefore the new proxy for AI’s growth trajectory—from NVIDIA’s 100 billion USD investment in OpenAI to OpenAI’s announcement of a 6GW deal with AMD and Anthropic’s recent 1GW announcement with Google. These gigawatts are necessary for the production of intelligence in “AI factories,” to borrow from NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s phrase, or “token factories,” to borrow from Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella’s phrase.
The most significant producer of tokens today is NVIDIA, which recently surpassed five trillion USD in market capitalization. In a recent interview with investor Brad Gerstner, Huang commented that every gigawatt of AI data center power translates into roughly 35—40 billion USD in revenue. Energy requirements show no sign of slowing down, with demand for Nvidia chips set to surpass 500 billion USD over the next two years.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Traugott spearheads EdgeCore’s advancement in emerging technologies and currently focuses on how AI reshapes the global data center ecosystem. Engaging with technologists, thought leaders, and community stakeholders, Traugott ensures EdgeCore remains at the forefront of innovation, sustainability, and geographic expansion—fulfilling the company’s commitment to deliver safe, future-ready solutions for the world’s leading cloud and technology providers.
With a career spanning from the post–dot-com era through the evolution of wholesale colocation, hyperscale cloud, and now AI-driven infrastructure, Traugott brings decades of insight to the industry. Before joining EdgeCore, he served at Amazon Web Services, where he oversaw strategy and execution for new and existing regions across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. Previously, he co-led Cassidy Turley’s (now Cushman & Wakefield’s) Data Center Advisory Practice, and earlier served as Regional VP of Sales at CoreSite Realty Corporation.
Traugott earned his BA in Social Studies with honors from Harvard College.
