Two AI labs take a third of new computing power and are headed for most of it
Each lab may hold 50 gigawatts by 2028, and because new chips do far more work, half of new machines means most of the useful power.
Dwarkesh Podcast · Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028Two artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, now take about a third of all the new computing power coming online, and they are on track to take most of it by 2028.
Dylan Patel, founder of the chip research firm SemiAnalysis, says each lab started the year with about 2 gigawatts of data center capacity and will end with more than 5. He puts the two labs' share of computing power added worldwide this year at about 30 percent of 30 gigawatts. Next year, their share rises to 40 to 50 percent of about 50 gigawatts, reaching half of all new capacity before next year is out.
If that tripling continues, each lab reaches more than 50 gigawatts by the end of 2028, or 100 combined, equal to 70 to 80 percent of new capacity. Because newer chips offer three to five times more performance per watt, that new half would run at higher performance than everything built before it.
Questions people ask
What does a gigawatt mean for a data center?
A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. For data centers, it describes how much power the buildings can draw to run chips, cooling, and networking, which roughly tells you how many AI chips can operate inside.
Why focus on new computing power instead of the total?
Total computing power includes every older machine still running. New computing power is only what gets added that year. Because the industry is adding 30 to 70 gigawatts a year, the new machines quickly become most of what matters, especially since they are faster.
Do OpenAI and Anthropic own all that computing power?
Not always. Much of it is built by others, including cloud providers and builders such as SpaceX, and then rented to them. Patel counts it as lab computing power because OpenAI and Anthropic are the final customers paying for it.