For over 50 years, technological progress has been benchmarked by Moore’s Law—the doubling of transistors on a microchip every two years. The $100 billion OpenAI-Nvidia deal signals the end of that era and the dawn of a new paradigm: progress measured in “Gigawatt Scale.” In the age of AI, the driver of innovation is no longer just the elegance of a chip, but the raw, brutal power of the infrastructure that supports it.
This partnership is the first to explicitly codify this new law of progress. The goal is not just to build a faster computer, but to construct a 10-gigawatt ecosystem, a scale previously associated with national energy grids. This move suggests that future AI breakthroughs—the kind Sam Altman envisions—are gated not by incremental chip improvements but by massive, step-function increases in available energy and data processing capacity. The unit of progress is no longer the nanometer; it’s the gigawatt.
Under this new model, the foundational elements of innovation have changed. The key ingredients are no longer just silicon and software, but also access to massive power sources, advanced cooling technologies, and the capital to build data centers the size of small cities. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang is effectively betting that his company’s future lies in enabling this new, larger scale of ambition, moving from a chip provider to an infrastructure architect.
This shift has profound implications. It suggests a future where only a handful of entities—corporations or nations with immense resources—can operate at the frontier of AI research. While Moore’s Law had a democratizing effect over time, making computing cheaper and more accessible, the “Gigawatt Scale” law implies the opposite: a concentration of power in the hands of those who can afford to build these computational cathedrals.
The construction of the first phase on the Vera Rubin platform in 2026 will be the first major test of this new theory of progress. If it yields the “new AI breakthroughs” Altman promises, it will confirm that we have entered a new epoch—one where the pace of human innovation is directly tied to our ability to build and power machines on a scale never before imagined.