This week’s announcement of the Nvidia-OpenAI partnership marks the formal dawn of a new technological epoch: the 10-Gigawatt Era of Artificial Intelligence. The decision to build an infrastructure of this specific, immense scale signals that the development of AI has graduated from a laboratory science to an industrial-scale endeavor, demanding resources on par with national energy grids.
In this new era, the gigawatt will become a key unit of measurement for AI leadership, much like terabytes defined the storage era or gigahertz defined the PC era. An entity’s influence and capability in the AI race will be directly correlated with the number of gigawatts of dedicated compute it can command. With this deal, Nvidia and OpenAI have established themselves as the first superpower of this era.
This era will be characterized by AI models of unimaginable complexity and capability. The computational power of a 10-gigawatt system will allow for the training of models with trillions more parameters than today’s, potentially unlocking new emergent abilities in reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving that will define the next generation of AI services.
The 10-Gigawatt Era also brings new challenges, particularly around energy consumption and sustainability. The responsibility to power these massive AI factories with clean, sustainable energy will become a central issue for the industry and for society as a whole, a topic of intense discussion here in India and globally.
As of September 2025, the starting gun for this new era has been fired. The partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI is not just a business deal; it is the founding act of a new age, a bold step into a future where progress is measured in gigawatts and the goal is nothing less than a new form of intelligence.