Exactly how much energy will hyperscalers need to run data centers?

Grid operators are seeing increased energy demand as the AI race heats up among hyperscalers. The Morning Brief's Madison Mills breaks down a chart from Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk showing how much energy some of the "Magnificent Seven" members — like Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) — need to run their data centers.

Note: Apollo Global Management is Yahoo Finance's parent company

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl

Video Transcript

It's time now for our chart of the day ahead of big tech results next week, we're going to take a look at how much energy some of those mag seven members need to run their data centers.

Apollo Torsten log out with this chart this morning indicating that right now, the largest hyper scale data centers run by the likes of Google Amazon Microsoft, those require about one gigawatt of power and that's expected to soar to eight gigawatts by 2030.

So to put this into context, we're going to look at New York City's power demand, it's about six gigawatts.

So to add the 18 gigawatts to the US power grid, you need to build three times the power grid of New York City just to support data centers alone.

That's not including all the other energy demands that you can see on the bottom part of this third bar here that are required and expected to increase as well.

Just as every day life requires more energy.

Now this strain on the grid, it's not easy.

It's also not cheap.

Infrastructure upgrades are very expensive, take a lot of time and this energy use.

It also impacts the environment.

That's part of why we've seen such a push to nuclear energy as several hyper scalar are partnering with nuclear energy companies in an effort to get access to clean energy and that is part of the growing demands overall of data centers.

Guys.