Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic
Comment Next year will see some truly monstrous compute projects get underway as the AI boom enters its third year. Among the largest disclosed so far is xAI's plan to expand its Colossus AI supercomputer from an already impressive 100,000 GPUs to a cool million.
Such a figure seemingly defies logic. Even if you could source enough GPUs for this new Colossus, the power and cooling – not to mention capital – required to support it would be immense.
At $30,000 to $40,000 a pop, adding another 900,000 GPUs would set xAI back $27 to $36 billion. Even with a generous bulk discount, it still won't be cheap regardless of whether they're deployed over the course of several years. Oh, and that's not even taking into account the cost of the building, cooling, and the electrical infrastructure to support all those accelerators.
Speaking of power, depending on what generation of accelerators xAI plans to deploy, the GPU nodes alone would require roughly 1.2 to 1.5 gigawatts of generation. That's more than the typical nuclear reactor – and the big ones, no less. And again, that's just for the compute.
