Say what you will about Elon Musk, but when the technological disruptor sets his mind to something, he plays to win. Founded only in July of last year, his latest artificial intelligence startup, xAI, just brought a new supercomputer dubbed “Colossus” online during the Labor Day weekend designed to train its large language model (LLM) known as Grok, a rival to Open AI’s better known GPT-4. While Grok is limited to paying subscribers of Musk’s X social media platform, many Tesla experts speculate it will eventually form the artificial intelligence powering the EV manufacturer’s humanoid robot Optimus. Musk estimates this strategic lighthouse project could eventually earn Tesla $1 trillion in profits annually. Located in Tennessee, the new xAI data center houses 100,000 Nvidia benchmark Hopper H100 processors, more than any other individual AI compute cluster. “From start to finish, it was done in 122 days,” Musk wrote, calling Colossus “the most powerful AI training system in the world”. It doesn’t end there for xAI, either: Musk estimates he will double Colossus’s compute capacity in a matter of months once he can procure 50,000 chips of Nvidia’s new, more advanced H200 series, which are roughly twice as powerful. Musk and xAI did not respond to requests from Fortune for comment. The pace at which Colossus has been set up is blistering given xAI had only selected its Memphis site in June. Moreover, several heavy-hitting tech firms, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are competing to acquire Nvidia’s prized Hopper series AI chips in the current AI gold rush alongside Musk. But the AI entrepreneur is a valued customer of Nvidia and pledged to spend $3-4 billion this year on CEO Jensen Huang’s hardware—just for Tesla alone. Moreover, xAI enjoyed a head start by helping itself to Tesla’s supply of AI chips already delivered to the EV manufacturer.
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