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Elon Musk's xAI startup is now training its next AI model at the company's new supercomputing facility in Memphis, Tennessee, the executive confirmed early Monday morning.
"Nice work by xAI team, X team, Nvidia & supporting companies getting Memphis Supercluster training started at ~4:20 a.m. local time," Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, which he also owns. "With 100k liquid-cooled H100s on a single RDMA fabric, it’s the most powerful AI training cluster in the world!"
Nvidia's H100 GPUs are designed for training AI models, which require tons of energy and computing power to operate. Now, Musk has a massive computer cluster of over 100,000 GPUs to train the next version of xAI's quirky chatbot, Grok.
Last month, the economic development group Greater Memphis Chamber confirmed that xAI's computing facility, dubbed the "Gigafactory of Compute," was in the works. The organization explained that the facility would take over a former manufacturing facility. Back in May, xAI said it had secured $6 billion in funding to pursue AI development. The company currently has six job listings for its Memphis supercomputing site for positions such as fiber foreman, network engineer, and project manager, to name a few.
While the Greater Memphis Chamber group has praised xAI's decision to open up shop in the area, other locals have expressed concerns about the facility's energy and water consumption. The Memphis Community Against Pollution group, along with two other environmental groups, warned the computing facility creates a significant "energy burden."
"XAI is also expected to need at least one million gallons of water per day for its cooling towers," the groups said in an open letter last month. "We encourage xAI to support investment in a City of Memphis wastewater reuse system to reduce strain on our water supply."
The CEO of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water estimated xAI's Memphis facility may use up to 150 megawatts of electricity an hour, which is roughly equivalent to that needed to power 100,000 homes.
"People are afraid. They’re afraid of what’s possibly going to happen with the water and they are afraid about the energy supply," Memphis City Council member Pearl Walker said last week.
While certainly massive, xAI's Memphis spot may not necessarily be the largest computing facility in the world, however. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta are also using data centers to train and operate their AI models, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowing to acquire 350,000 Nvidia H100s this year.
Musk has previously said that xAI plans to release Grok 2 next month, but it's unclear whether or how it might use this supercomputing cluster. Grok 3, however, will be training on the 100,000 H100s in Memphis, and is slated to release by the end of this year.