Elon Musk said on Tuesday his artificial intelligence startup xAI has bought a third building to expand its infrastructure, aiming to boost training capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts of compute power.
The latest expansion underscores xAI's ambitious push to
compete more effectively with industry leaders OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's
Claude by training increasingly advanced models. The company's supercomputer
cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Colossus, is touted as the largest in
the world.
"xAI has bought a third building called MACROHARDRR," Musk wrote on X, without disclosing its location. The term is potentially a play on Microsoft's name.
The new building is just the beginning of the expected
expenses, though. After all, xAI still must acquire the GPUs, power sources,
and more for the site to be productive. And even though Musk is one of the
richest people on earth, he’s still working to raise tens of billions of dollars
to help fund it, as xAI is burning through over a billion dollars a month, as
it races to build the most advanced AI on the planet.
Even though Musk is still working on the funding for the project, Nvidia has already reportedly signed a deal to deliver the needed GPUs for the site, helping him reach his goal of acquiring 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs in the next five years. Musk's ultimate goal, though, is to have more AI compute than everyone else combined, challenging Microsoft and other AI titans. Aside from acquiring the chips for the AI data center, the billionaire also needs to find a way to power it. It’s already been confirmed that Musk bought an overseas power plant and is shipping it to the U.S. to power Colossus 2. xAI has already set its sights on installing a gas turbine facility, which is set to supply 460MW from natural gas, helping the firm achieve its lofty compute capacity goals
Aiming to boost training capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts of
compute power, Elon Musk said that his artificial intelligence startup xAI has
bought a third building to expand its infrastructure. The latest expansion
underscores xAI's ambitious push to compete more effectively with industry
leaders OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude by training increasingly
advanced models.
The site acquisition brings xAI’s total planned power capacity
close to 2 gigawatts, a scale that places the project among the most
energy-intensive AI data centre clusters currently under development.
"xAI has bought a third building called
MACROHARDRR," Musk wrote on X, without disclosing its location. The term
is potentially a play on Microsoft's name.
xAI is planning to expand its supercomputer Colossus to
house at least 1 million graphics processing units.
According to a news report, the startup is planning to start
turning the newly purchased warehouse into a data center in 2026, adding that
both the new data center and Colossus 2 are close to a natural gas power plant
that xAI is building in the area, as well as other power sources.
However, the expansion of AI infrastructure has drawn criticism from environmental activists as data centers consume large amounts of energy..
By Advik Gupta
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