noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   One thousand million (10⁹) watts, an amount of power large enough to power such things as a midsize town or several small ones. (Consuming 1 gigawatt during a duration of 1 hour consumes 1 gigawatt-hour of energy.)

   "Holonyms: TW, terawatt < PW, petawatt"

2. 2
   The amount of data center capacity or amount of compute that this amount of power can provide under the current technological state of the art (PUE, clock speed, etc). metonymically

   "a gigawatt of compute"

Example

More examples

"Holonyms: TW, terawatt < PW, petawatt"

Etymology

From giga- + watt.

Related phrases

gigawatt-hourgigawatt-year

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.