You could think of it as "as much power as is used by NYC and Chicago combined". Which is fucking insanely wasteful.
Google is pretty useful.
It uses >15 TWh per year.
Theoretically, AI could be more useful than that.
Theoretically, in the future, it could be the same amount of useful (or much more) with substantially less power usage.
It could be a short-term crunch to pull-forward (slightly) AI advancements.
Additionally, I'm extremely skeptical they'll actually turn on this many chips using that much energy globally in a reasonable time-frame.
Saying that you're going to make that kind of investment is one thing. Actually getting the power for it is easier said than done.
VC "valuations" are already a joke. They're more like minimum valuations. If OpenAI is worth anywhere near it's current "valuations", Nvidia would be criminally negligent NOT to invest at a 90% discount (the marginal profit on their chips).
30 TWh per year is equivalent to an average power consumption of 3.4 GW for everything Google does. This partnership is 3x more energy intensive.
Ultimately the difference in `real value/MWh` between these two must be many orders of magnitude.
[1] https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...
You over-provision so that you (almost) always have enough compute to meet your customers needs (even at planet scale, your demand is bursty), you're always doing maintenance on some section, spinning up new hardware and turning down old hardware.
So, apples to apples, this would likely not even be 2x at 30TWh for Google.
More than a "Google" of new compute is of course still a lot, but it's not many Googles' worth.
AI that could find a cure for cancer isn't the driving economic factor in LLM expansion, I don't think. I doubt cancer researchers are holding their breath on this.