Musk’s new Memphis data center hits an AI milestone

Elon Musk’s new xAI data center in Memphis reached a major milestone this week, bringing online all 100,000 advanced Nvidia chips at the same time, according to people who have knowledge of the matter.

The feat makes the data center, nicknamed “Colossus,” the most powerful known computer ever built and represents a significant technical achievement for xAI, a relatively young company that made the massive facility operational in less than six months.

While Musk has tweeted about the facility, calling it the largest in the world, industry experts have questioned whether xAI has the required energy or the technical ability to run so many GPUs — in this case, Nvidia’s H100 chips — all at once.

“Musk may be overstating how many of the GPUs are actually operating in a single cluster,” The Information reported earlier this month. “No other company has been able to successfully string together 100,000 GPUs, due to the limitations of networking technology that connects chips to each other so they can act like a single computer.”

The achievement came earlier this week, allowing the company to train an AI model with more compute power than any other known one in history. xAI is using the data center to train the AI model behind Grok, the company’s chatbot that bills itself as an uncensored version of ChatGPT.

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