Frontier training power draw
This chart tracks the estimated electrical power drawn by the largest AI training run to date, in megawatts, using Epoch AI's model database. Each step up is a new frontier model whose training drew more power than any before it — from well under a megawatt in the mid-2010s to over one hundred megawatts today, roughly a small city's worth of electricity for a single training run.
What does it show?
The power needed to train one frontier model has grown about twentyfold since GPT-3 in 2020.
Methodology
Running maximum of estimated training power draw across models in Epoch AI's AI Models database, by publication month, since 2016, converted from watts to megawatts. Power figures are Epoch's published estimates of average draw during the training run and carry uncertainty; coverage is sparser than for compute, so the frontier can revise as models are added. Data © Epoch AI, 'Data on AI Models', epoch.ai, CC BY 4.0.