Key Points:
- Musk-owned xAI has launched its supercomputer, Colossus, which is now operational.
- The supercomputer, featuring 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, went live in just four months.
- xAI plans to double Colossus’ computational power soon to speed up the development of its Grok AI models.
Elon Musk’s xAI has officially brought its powerful new supercomputer, “Colossus,” online, utilizing 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs at its new Memphis, Tennessee facility.
Designed to train advanced AI models, Colossus represents xAI’s bold ambitions to revolutionize artificial intelligence. The first phase of its construction was completed in just four months, marking a significant milestone toward Musk’s goal of having the supercomputer fully operational by 2025.
Named after the supercomputer in the 1970 sci-fi film Colossus: The Forbin Project, this immense system is housed at a former Electrolux plant. Musk has dubbed the site a “gigafactory of compute,” with plans to expand the system to double its capacity, eventually hosting 200,000 GPUs, including an additional 50,000 of the newer, more powerful Nvidia H200 chips.
This vast array of GPUs ranks Colossus among the world’s largest supercomputer clusters. Securing these GPUs has been no easy feat, as industry giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft compete fiercely for Nvidia’s technology. However, xAI managed to obtain its initial batch of GPUs from Tesla’s reserves, ensuring the startup could move forward swiftly.
One of Colossus’ primary tasks will be to train Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot available to paid users on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. While Grok-2 was released in beta in August, Grok-3 is expected by the end of 2024 and will be trained using Colossus’ 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. This supercomputer is anticipated to significantly accelerate Grok’s learning process, but it will face competition from other tech companies like Meta, which are rapidly expanding their GPU capacity.
In addition to Grok, Colossus will also be instrumental in training AI models that could potentially power Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, marking another leap forward in Musk’s AI-driven innovations.
