Billionaire Elon Musk has taken to Twitter / X to boast that his remarkable xAI data center is set to double its firepower “soon.” He was commenting on the recent video exposé of his xAI Colossus AI supercomputer. In the highlighted video, TechTuber ServeTheHome was stunned when he saw the gleaming rows of Supermicro servers packed with 100,000 state-of-the-art Nvidia enterprise GPUs.
So, the xAI Colossus AI supercomputer is on course “Soon to become a 200k H100/H200 training cluster in a single building.” Its 100,000 GPU incarnation, which only just started AI training about two weeks ago, was already notable. While we think “soon” might indeed be soon in this case. However, Musk’s prior tech timing slippages (e.g., Tesla's full self-driving, Hyperloop delays, SolarCity struggles) mean we should be generally cautious about his forward-looking boasts.
The xAI Colossus has already been dubbed an engineering marvel. Importantly, praise for the supercomputer’s prowess isn’t limited to the usual Musk toadies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also described this supercomputer project as a “superhuman” feat that had “never been done before.” xAI engineers must have worked very hard and long hours to set up the xAI Colossus AI supercomputer in 19 days. Typically, projects of this scale and complexity can take up to four years to get running, indicated Huang.