Scaling with Power BI Premium and Azure Analysis Services
Power BI users with Pro licenses can create workspaces in the Shared or Premium capacity. Shared capacity is available by default to any organization using Power BI. Shared capacity is managed entirely by Microsoft, which load balance multiple tenants over thousands of physical machines around the world. To provide a consistent and fair experience for everyone, there are certain limits in Shared capacity. One that affects data volumes is the 1 GB size limit of a compressed dataset. Power BI Desktop will allow you to create datasets that are only limited by the amount of memory on the computer, but you will not be allowed to upload a dataset that's larger than 1 GB to Shared capacity. Similarly, if a dataset hosted in Shared capacity grows to over 1 GB, it will result in refresh errors. Note that this limit refers to the compressed data size, so the actual source data can be many times larger.