The new facility will complement xAI’s existing operations and support the company’s growing presence in Memphis, with the Colossus supercomputer well on the path to the supercluster size.
Greater Memphis Chamber Annual Chairman’s Luncheon (December 4, 2024): the Greater Memphis Chamber announced that xAI’s expansion of the Colossus facility would incorporate a minimum of one million GPUs. This expansion was highlighted as the largest capital investment in the region’s history, emphasizing its scale and economic impact. The project is already underway, with a projected completion date of 2026.
The expansion also follows an $80 million state-of-the-art Colossus Water Recycling Plant, featuring the world’s largest ceramic bioreactor (MBR) wastewater recycling system. Located in Frank C. Pidgeon Industrial Park, this innovative facility will process up to 13 million gallons of wastewater daily, eliminating the need to draw from the Memphis Aquifer for industrial use. This sustainable solution is expected to protect approximately 4.745 billion gallons of the Memphis Aquifer annually – a 9% reduction in demand – while also serving other major industrial users in the region.
The facility also features the world’s largest Tesla Megapack deployment for supercompututing and data center operations, ensuring the facility never draws from the grid during demand response periods, prioritizing the energy needs of Memphis residents and surrounding communities.
In late 2024, xAI has been approved to lease more than 500 acres near the company’s supercomputer site in Memphis, expanding the company’s footprint in the city. xAI continues to scale up the world’s largest supercomputer, Colossus, at a 271-acre site in southwest Memphis. In October, 2024, the Economic Development Growth Engine, the local development board, approved the lease with xAI affiliate CTC Property LLC for a 522-acre parcel in the Pidgeon Industrial Park near the Mississippi River.
Colossus is being built in a 750,000 square foot building that was previously used by Electrolux.
xAI also built a major data center in Atlanta. The facility will be equipped with $700 million worth of AI hardware, including more than 12,000 Nvidia GPUs.
The Atlanta facility is expected to house 12,448 GPUs.
The vast majority of the chips will reportedly be comprised of Hopper generation H100 GPUs, while about 3% of the facility will be comprised of Nvidia A100 GPUs.
Out of the $700 million in computing hardware that is being invested in the facility, $442 million is reportedly allocated to X, and $258 is allocated to xAI.
In Feb, 2025, Dell announced they are selling $5 billion worth of servers containing Nvidia graphics processing units to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI. This will be Nvidia’s GB200 graphics processing units (GPUs) that will be delivered this year.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I wonder if XAI has looked into selling it’s waste-heat – particularly in the winter.
Seems like there are ways it could be done for local businesses, factories, homes, etc.