Elon Musk’s XAI is expanding its presence in Memphis, which currently houses the Colossus supercomputer cluster at a former Electrolux facility.
xAI activated Colossus in Jul. At that time, it is equipped with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. In late October, Elon Musk announced that Colossus would soon be powered by 200,000 Nvidia H100/H200 GPUs.
Key point:
According to the Greater Memphis Chamber, xAI intends to increase the number of Colossus GPUs to at least 1 million units, as noted in Insider the report The move is expected to strengthen xAI’s position against rivals such as OpenAI and Google by further expanding the capabilities of its large Grok language model.
Brent Mayo, xAI engineer, emphasized the project’s role in local and technological progress. “In Memphis, we are pioneering developments in America’s heartland. We not only lead from the front; we are accelerating progress at an unprecedented pace while ensuring network stability using megapack technology,” said the engineer.
Musk laughed off the upgrade, joking that the facility would use at least 1 billion GPUs.
The Colossus is particularly notable for being built in just 122 days. Musk himself stated that “it took 19 days to move Colossus from equipment installation to training.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appreciated xAI’s speed and effortcalling it a “superhuman” task and acknowledging Musk’s engineering acumen. Huang also stated that it usually takes about three years to plan a project like Colossus and one year to build it.
The market value of xAI was at an all-time high and soared to $50 billion. This is about twice as much as compared to the spring of this year. The company has also raised a notable $11 billion in 2024.
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The xAI supercomputer in Memphis will be upgraded to 1 million GPUs