Elon Musk has announced that xAI has acquired a third facility at the Memphis, Tennessee location, close to the Colossus 2 datacenter to increase the training throughput. The billionaire announced on the social media platform 'X' that the facility will be named 'MACROHARDRR', a further expansion of Musk's 'Macrohard' initiative, in which the mogul plans to develop the software right from scratch using AI agents alone. The acquisition will supposedly boost the total training compute power of xAI to an astounding 2 gigawatts.
The new construction effort is merely the beginning of the costs that are to be incurred, however. This is because xAI still needs to procure the GPUs, the power sources, and more to make it a productive facility. And although Elon Musk is one of the richest individuals in the world, he still has to try to drum up tens of billions of dollars for the effort, as xAI is going through over a billion dollars a month to try to build the world's greatest AI.
Despite this, Musk is still trying to finalize the funding for the project, but Nvidia has already signed a deal for the supply of the needed GPUs for the installation, helping Musk meet his objective of getting 50 million H100 class GPUs within the next five years. However, Musk's long term objective is to have more compute power for AI compared to all others combined, going head to head against Microsoft and other AI heavyweights. Besides securing the GPUs for the installation of the AI data center, the billionaire entrepreneur still has much work cut out for him finding a means to power the center. Already confirmed is Musk's purchase of an overseas power plant, transporting it to the U.S. for Colossus 2, while xAI has earmarked a ground installation for a gas turbine plant, meant to provide 460MW power using natural gas, helping the company meet its lofty objectives for compute capability.
Despite xAI being a rather latecomer in the race for AI advancement, it soon equalized with other established participants in the race such as OpenAI due to the enormous investments made in this endeavor by none other than Elon Musk. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even labeled his first project named Colossus as ‘superhuman’ work after his facility is now established in just 19 days which normally would have been accomplished in four years. Yet with other participants in this race in the world of AI spending billions of dollars in developing their projects as well, it will be interesting or rather terrifying to see what will be in store for us in the long run due to these enormous expenses.
