The world’s most powerful AI supercomputer xAI Colossus will be expanded tenfold – up to 1 million Nvidia chips

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is looking to massively expand its Colossus supercomputer to more than 1 million GPUs. This will help close the gap with competitors such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, reports the Financial Times.

Image source: x.com/xai

Colossus was assembled this year in just three months – it now includes an array of 100 thousand Nvidia artificial intelligence accelerators, and by this criterion it is the largest supercomputer in the world. It is used to train AI models for the Grok chatbot, which is less advanced and has fewer users than OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

Work to expand the facility in Memphis, Tennessee, tenfold has already begun, the metropolitan Chamber of Commerce reported. Assistance in the implementation of the project will be provided by Nvidia, Dell and Supermicro; a “xAI task force” will be formed.

Companies working in the field of AI are actively trying to secure supplies of accelerators or access to data centers – training and running large language models requires serious computing power. Thus, the company responsible for ChatGPT, OpenAI, received investments from Microsoft amounting to more than $14 billion; investments from Amazon’s Anthropic, which created the chatbot Claude, amounted to $8 billion – the e-commerce giant also promised its partner access to a new cluster of more than 100 thousand AI accelerators of its own design.

Musk decided not to form partner projects, but to build a self-sufficient company from scratch, xAI, which recently raised another $5 billion at a valuation of $45 billion. The project aims to become a competitor to OpenAI, in the creation of which the businessman also participated in 2015 – he recently filed for it in court requesting to prohibit reorganization into a commercial company.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously said that projects the size of Colossus typically take three years to build, rather than three months. “We don’t just lead; “We are accelerating progress at an unprecedented rate to ensure grid stability using Megapack technology,” said Brent Mayo, xAI senior manager for construction and infrastructure, when the company was accused of manipulation of construction permits and excessive requirements for regional energy system.