Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI has purchased a 1-million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis, Tennessee.
What Happened: The new investment builds on xAI’s December announcement, where it detailed plans to scale Colossus to house at least one million GPUs in the state.
The Greater Memphis Chamber confirmed on Friday that the project is progressing rapidly, stating that Colossus is “well on the path to the supercluster size” as outlined in xAI’s original expansion blueprint.
Environmental activists have criticized the expansion due to the high energy consumption of data centers.
However, the Memphis Chamber highlighted that xAI’s new facility includes an $80 million water recycling plant and the world’s largest deployment of Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Megapacks for data center operations.
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Why It Matters: Colossus is seen as a critical component of Musk’s AI strategy, as he seeks to compete with OpenAI and other industry leaders.
Last year in December, xAI raised $6 billion to expand its Colossus supercomputer, aiming to increase its GPU count from 100,000 to over a million.
Last month, xAI’s AI chatbot Grok, which is set to be integrated into Tesla vehicles, has surpassed competitors like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to become the leading productivity app on the App Store.
This development happened following xAI’s release of Grok 3, which introduced new AI capabilities, including image analysis.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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