What a Megawatt Earns

How the numbers were built

Every company figure divides a year's revenue by the same year's electricity use, turned into an average load: annual MWh ÷ 8,760. Revenue and gross PP&E for US filers come from SEC XBRL data; electricity comes from each company's sustainability report. Where a company only discloses capacity (CoreWeave's active power, OpenAI's compute), the chart uses capacity and says so.

Revenue per dollar of plant divides the same revenue by gross property, plant and equipment at fiscal year-end. One over that ratio is the number of years of revenue it takes to equal the plant.

Bottom-up rows multiply the output one megawatt makes in a year by a market price: 631 t of aluminum at 13.88 MWh/t, 13,036 t of steel at 0.672 MWh/t, 168 t of hydrogen at 52 kWh/kg, 2.5 million m³ of desalinated water at 3.5 kWh/m³, and 57.8 PH/s of bitcoin hashrate at 17.3 J/TH.

What the ratio leaves out

• Value added. Revenue per MW rewards businesses that resell costly inputs: scrap in steel, alumina in aluminum, parts in cars. The power bill column is a better guide to how much each use can pay for electricity.
• Cycles. Memory prices move revenue per MW fast. Micron went from $33M in FY25 to about $81M over the 12 months to May 2026 on the same load; SK hynix rose from $18M (2023) to $44M (2025).
• Capacity against load. Data centers contract more grid capacity than they draw on average, while smelters and electrolysis plants run near flat out. Per MW of contracted capacity, data-center figures would be lower.
• Boundaries. SK hynix's electricity excludes its Dalian fab. CATL's includes materials and mining. Alcoa's counts purchased power only. Olin reports total energy, not electricity. Intel's and Eli Lilly's electricity is derived from reported energy and renewable shares.
• Not disclosed. Anthropic reports run-rate revenue but not its compute capacity, so it has no row. OpenAI's 2026 revenue is reported by the press, but its online compute is not.