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Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up xAI has promised to expand its Colossus supercomputer tenfold to include greater than 1,000,000 graphics processing units to remain ahead of rivals resembling Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Built just three months earlier this 12 months, Colossus is claimed to be the world's largest supercomputer, boasting a cluster of greater than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs connected together. The chips are used to coach Musk's chatbot Grok, which is less advanced and has fewer users than market leader ChatGPT or Google's Gemini.
Work has already begun to expand the power in Memphis, Tennessee, in accordance with an announcement from the Greater Memphis Chamber on Wednesday. Nvidia, Dell and Supermicro Computer would also open offices in Memphis to support the expansion, the Chamber of Commerce said, and they might create an “xAI special operations team” to “provide the corporate with 24/7 concierge service.”
The cost of buying so many GPUs could be significant. The latest generation of Nvidia GPUs typically cost tens of 1000’s of dollars, but older versions of the chips might be cheaper. Musk's planned expansion of Colossus would require an investment of tens of billions of dollars – plus the high costs of constructing, powering and cooling the large servers that will house them. xAI has raised around $11 billion in capital from investors this 12 months.
AI firms are scrambling to secure GPUs and access to data centers to offer the computing power needed to coach and run their groundbreaking models for giant languages.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a partnership with Microsoft value nearly $14 billion that features credits for computing power. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, has received an $8 billion investment from Amazon and can achieve this soon Access given to a brand new cluster of greater than 100,000 of its specialized AI chips.
Instead of forging partnerships, Musk, the world's richest man, has used his power and influence within the tech sector to construct his own supercomputing capability, although he’s playing catch-up after founding xAI little greater than a 12 months ago. The growth has been steep – the start-up is valued at $45 billion and recently raised one other $5 billion.
Musk is in fierce competition with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015 along with Sam Altman, amongst others. The pair then fell out and Musk is now suing OpenAI to dam its transition from a nonprofit to a more traditional company.
An investor in xAI said the speed at which Musk created Colossus was the AI ​​company's “virtue,” despite it having limited business product offerings. “He built probably the most powerful supercomputer on this planet in three months.”
Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said in October that “there's just one person on this planet who can do that.” Huang called Colossus “by far the fastest supercomputer on this planet as a cluster” and said an information center of this size would normally take three years to construct.
The Colossus project has sparked controversy due to speed at which it was built. Some of them accused it of evading constructing permits and criticized the demands it places on the region's power grid.
“We don’t just lead from the front; “We are accelerating progress at an unprecedented pace while ensuring network stability using Megapack technology,” said Brent Mayo, senior manager of site construct and infrastructure at xAI, at an event in Memphis, in accordance with the statement.
