By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI plans to expand its Memphis, Tennessee, supercomputer to house at least one million graphics processing units (GPUs), the company said on Wednesday. Greater Memphis Chamber, as xAI struggles to compete with rivals like OpenAI.
The move represents a massive expansion for the supercomputer called Colossus, which currently has 100,000 GPUs to train xAI’s chatbot called Grok.
As part of the expansion, Nvidia, which supplies the GPUs, as well as Dell and Super Micro, which assembled the server racks for the computer, will establish their operations in Memphis, the chamber said in a statement.
Colossus is a critical part of advancing Musk’s AI efforts, as the billionaire has deepened his rivalry with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Last month, Musk expanded his lawsuit against the creator of ChatGPT, arguing that OpenAI and Microsoft illegally sought to monopolize the AI market.
The plan to scale up the xAI supercomputer will likely raise environmental concerns as activists and lawmakers have scrutinized the growing number of data centers due to their enormous energy consumption. In August, the Southern Environmental Law Center called local authorities in Tennessee to investigate whether xAI was using gas turbines to power its supercomputer without the required aerial permits.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Austin; editing by Daniel Wallis)