Elon Musk’s xAI is purchasing a third building for the Colossus data center complex in Memphis, Texas. The total capacity will grow to nearly 2 gigawatts. The new building will be given the playful name “MACROHARDRR,” according to Musk.
The new building is located next to Colossus 2 near Southaven, Mississippi. xAI wants to convert it into a data center in 2025, Musk writes on X. The building is located near a gas-fired power plant that xAI is also building. That plant will have to meet the enormous power demand.
Colossus already houses one massive data center, and a second is under construction. The third location will accommodate thousands of new servers for AI models. The complex will thus grow into one of the world’s largest AI training facilities.
Colossus 2 will have 555,000 GPUs
The expansion is costly. Colossus 2 will receive more than 555,000 graphics processors from Nvidia for approximately $18 billion. That amount does not even cover the associated servers and cooling systems.
Musk founded xAI in 2023 as a counterpart to OpenAI, the company he co-founded but left after public disagreements with CEO Sam Altman. xAI built the AI chatbot Grok, now well known among X users.
Water purification for millions of liters per day
The energy hunger of AI data centers such as Colossus is attracting criticism. The complex is expected to use millions of liters of water per day to cool servers and infrastructure. To reduce its environmental footprint, xAI announced in February that it would build a treatment plant for around $80 million. This plant is expected to reuse approximately 13 million liters of wastewater per day. Critics argue that the total energy consumption of up to 2 gigawatts could also have been used by 1.5 million households in a year.
The current phase of Colossus runs at about 70 megawatts with 100,000 GPUs. Colossus 2 doubles that to 140 megawatts with 200,000 processors. The future scale of more than 1 gigawatt requires additional gas turbines and an extensive cooling system.
Musk’s AI company is raising funding from third parties. xAI raised $10 billion in July through equity financing and loans. Since then, the company has been in talks with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF and other investors about another $20 billion. That would bring its value to over $170 billion.