You've seen the headline: a new data centre, 200 megawatts. Here's how to give that number a shape.
In under 90 seconds: the difference between a megawatt (how fast) and a megawatt-hour (how much), why your power bill is in kilowatt-hours, what 200 megawatts looks like in kettles, and why a data centre's headline number deserves a second look. Is it the whole site, or just the computers? And what it's built for isn't the same as what it uses.
The line to take to your next dinner party:
Megawatts is how fast. Megawatt-hours is how much.
The maths: 200 MW = 200,000 kW. At about 2 kW a kettle, that's roughly 100,000 kettles boiling at once.
I designed and directed this, and edited a script first drafted with Claude. The voice is an AI clone of my own (ElevenLabs Professional Voice Cloning), and the animation was built with Claude Opus 5.5.
Short version: https://youtube.com/shorts/OEIF71d2-CI?feature=share
More explainers: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT4YJYzEYhRw
The AI Transition, on what AI is doing to work and the people who do it:
https://aitransition.com.au
#AI #DataCentres #Energy #Electricity