Google might start 2026 with the largest training system among the big labs, by a factor of about 2x, at about 1 GW.
OpenAI/Microsoft Stargate schism suggests that compute being built this year by Microsoft is unlikely to form part of a geographically distributed training system that also includes compute being built at Abilene site. Seems like OpenAI will be building its own training systems (through Stargate), while Microsoft will be serving inference (and possibly generation for RL training, but it remains unclear if it can be an important fraction of pretraining budget in 2025-2026). Thus only 400-600 MW of GB200s by end of 2025 for an OpenAI training system, not 1 GW.
I would not be surprised if in 2026 we have more than a million of some kind of chip.
Meanwhile, xAI will have a 200K H100/H200 system, and Anthropic a 400K Trn2 system, which is about 250K H100s worth of FLOP/s (ready by a few months into 2025). The 400-600 MW at Abilene site for OpenAI are 200K-300K B200s, which is about 500K-750K H100s worth of FLOP/s.
Google might start 2026 with the largest training system among the big labs, by a factor of about 2x, at about 1 GW.
OpenAI/Microsoft Stargate schism suggests that compute being built this year by Microsoft is unlikely to form part of a geographically distributed training system that also includes compute being built at Abilene site. Seems like OpenAI will be building its own training systems (through Stargate), while Microsoft will be serving inference (and possibly generation for RL training, but it remains unclear if it can be an important fraction of pretraining budget in 2025-2026). Thus only 400-600 MW of GB200s by end of 2025 for an OpenAI training system, not 1 GW.
Meta announced a 2 GW datacenter at Richland Parish site, but 1 GW for 2025 seems to be across all datacenters, not for a single training system. So the training system will be smaller by end of 2025.
How does Anthropic and XAi’s compute compare over this period?
What actually happens with xAI and Anthropic compute by end of 2025 is less clear. For xAI, 300K B200s figure was mentioned in June 2024. For Anthropic, Amodei said in a recent interview that
Meanwhile, xAI will have a 200K H100/H200 system, and Anthropic a 400K Trn2 system, which is about 250K H100s worth of FLOP/s (ready by a few months into 2025). The 400-600 MW at Abilene site for OpenAI are 200K-300K B200s, which is about 500K-750K H100s worth of FLOP/s.
For context, average US electricity consumption in 2022 was ~500GW. So these would be ~1% of all US electricity consumption (as an order of magnitude)