The world's most powerful AI supercomputer to be expanded tenfold

Elon Musk's startup xAI plans to beef up its Colossus supercomputer - to more than 1 million GPUs. This will help close the gap with rivals such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, the Financial Times reports.

Colossus was assembled this year in just three months - it now includes an array of 100,000 Nvidia artificial intelligence gas pedals, and by this criterion it is the largest supercomputer in the world. It is used to train AI models for the Grok chatbot, which has fewer users than OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

Work on the supercomputer in Memphis has already begun, the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce said. Nvidia, Dell, and Supermicro will assist with the project; a “dedicated xAI task force” will be formed.

AI companies are actively trying to secure gas pedal shipments or access to data centers for themselves. For example, OpenAI received investments from Microsoft for more than $14 billion; Amazon's investment in Anthropic's Claude chatbot amounted to $8 billion. Amazon also promised its partner access to a new cluster of more than 100,000 AI gas pedals of its own design.

Musk decided not to form partner projects, and from scratch to build a self-sufficient company xAI, which recently raised another $5 billion at a valuation of $45 billion. The project is trying to compete with OpenAI, in the creation of which in 2015 Musk also participated. He recently sued OpenAI to stop it from reorganizing into a for-profit company.