Elon Musk’s new xAI data center in Memphis reached a major milestone this week, bringing all 100,000 of its advanced NVIDIA chips online simultaneously, according to people familiar with the matter.
This feat makes the data center, nicknamed “Colossus,” the most powerful known computer ever built, and it’s a relatively young company that had this massive facility up and running in less than six months. This is a significant technological achievement for the company xAI.
Musk has tweeted about the facility, calling it the world’s largest, but industry experts say xAI won’t have the energy or technology needed to run so many GPUs (in this case, Nvidia’s H100 chips) at once. There are doubts as to whether or not they have the necessary skills.
“Musk may be exaggerating the number of GPUs actually running in a single cluster,” The Information reported earlier this month. “No other company has been able to successfully combine 100,000 GPUs because of the limitations of networking technology that connects chips together to act like a single computer.”
The results, announced earlier this week, enable the company to train an AI model with more computational power than any model known in history. xAI uses its data centers to train the AI model behind Grok, its chatbot that bills itself as an uncensored version of ChatGPT.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
