Recent announcements concerning data center compute capacity require some context, and what we have seen in the market is alarming. With OpenAI and both AMD and Broadcom most recently committing to 10 GW of new installations, it must be reiterated that these are unprecedented and unsustainable levels of capacity. Our sister service, RAN Research, recently studied the Telco Compute and GPUaaS market, and part of this forecast was determining the size of the current data center capacity and power requirements. Using a meta-study approach, it determined that 2024 demand spanned between 410-505 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity annually. To convert from TWh to the gigawatts that the spate of announcements has focused on requires some calculation. A watt is a…