General Discussion

Fortune - Memphis warns it may not be able to power Elon Musk’s lofty ‘Colossus’ supercomputer expansion plans

BY Jessica Mathews
January 8, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

In December, one of xAI’s executives got up on stage in front of city leaders in Memphis, and announced that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company was working on an enormous expansion to the “Colossus” supercomputer facility it had recently put together to train its AI model, Grok.

The planned buildout would create an even greater colossus, a behemoth capable of housing a heaping 1 million Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)—a 900% increase to the 100,000 GPUs that xAI’s existing Memphis facility currently has.

But an important wrinkle has recently come to light that could affect Musk’s grand plans: Whether Memphis even has the power framework needed to support such a facility.

During a Memphis City Council meeting on Tuesday, the CEO of Memphis’ utility company warned that such an expansion might not even be possible without building new infrastructure.

“People can announce many things, and I think that’s important for our community—that we get excited about opportunities that are coming. But as you know, there’s pragmatic realities about a lot of things,” Doug McGowan, CEO of MGLW, the public utility that services the Memphis region, said during the meeting. He added later: “It is a physics problem, not a political problem, about how much energy can be provided here.”

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