XAI Colossus 2 First Gigawatt AI Data Center

XAI Colossus 2’s is targeting ~1 Gigawatt as soon as possible. They have natural gas turbines for primary generation, batteries for stability, and grid for long-term scalability.

XAI Colossus 2 has power from seven installed SMT-360/Titan-350 Natural Gas Turbines. The seven turbines in question are deployed at the Southaven, Mississippi site 6 miles from Colossus 2’s core Memphis facility and were acquired in late July/early August 2025. SemiAnalysis and Patel report the Titan-350 models from Solar Turbines (a Caterpillar subsidiary) were chosen for their mobile, high-efficiency design (up to 40% thermal efficiency) and rapid deployment (weeks vs. months for grid upgrades). Each Titan-350 can generate 35-38 Megawatts of power.

This power Colossus 2 via medium-voltage (MV) interconnect lines, providing primary baseload power for ~110,000 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 GPUs (targeting 1.1 PFlops FP8 compute).

xAI’s joint venture (JV) with Solaris Energy Infrastructure (50.1% Solaris, 49.9% xAI) has already deployed $112 million in Q2 2025 CapEx for turbines, with Q4 2025-Q1 2026 ramping to enable over 1.1 GW total by Q2 2027 (and options for 1.5+ GW). This is fueled by temporary permitting loopholes (e.g., 12-month approvals without full environmental review) and land acquisitions like the former Duke Energy plant in Southaven.

The mobile turbines can reach 1.1 gigawatts with about 30+ Titan-350 turbines.

Grid Power (Substation) for 300 MW in 45-90 days

There is current minimal power (~0.5 MW initial from Memphis Light, Gas & Water/MLGW), as turbines handle 90%+ load. No full tie-in yet due to TVA delays.

A second dedicated substation (150-300 MW) is under construction and is directly funded by xAI ($50M+ upfront).

They target getting it online by October 2025, relegating turbines to peaker/backup.

The status is the foundations are complete and energization is imminent (60-90 days from September permits). Patel notes xAI’s direct funding (paying TVA $50M+) model accelerates this 2-3x faster than hyperscalers like Meta.

Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis warns of over $10 Billion of capital spending is needed total CapEx.

Tesla Megapacks will provide power backup and resilience for outages, demand-response, and turbine ramping. they can provide 4 hours of power. They are planing to deploy 200 megapack for about 1 gigawatt hour of buffering.

There is ~150-200 MWh of megapacks deployed at Colossus 2. They will have more batteries than Colossus 1’s 156 units/ ~600 MWh and connecting via MV (medium voltage) lines to Southaven.

Tesla megapack revenue for Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 could combine to hit $500 million.

Musk envisions solar and battery at 100 GW-1 TW scale but near-term it is Megapacks and gas turbines as a bridge.

Brian Wang

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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