Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence (AI) startup xAI has invested over $400 million thus far to construct what it calls the world’s largest supercomputer facility in Memphis, Tennessee, nevertheless it will not be capable to get sufficient energy from the native grid.
As of now, fourteen building allow purposes for the venture have been filed since June 2024.(Representational Picture/Pixabay)
As of now, fourteen building allow purposes for the venture have been filed since June 2024, in keeping with a Enterprise Insider report.
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xAI has requested 300 megawatts of grid energy from Memphis Gentle, Fuel and Water however has been accepted for less than 150 megawatts, in keeping with the report.
Because of this, xAI cannot serve buyer wants “without additional on-site power generation,” the report quoted the corporate as having stated in a allowing utility.
In the meantime, xAI has been supplementing its energy provide with gas-powered mills from Caterpillar’s subsidiary Photo voltaic Generators, producing a mixed 250 MW.
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The “gigafactory of compute” presently has 200,000 Nvidia GPUs (H100 and H200) put in in simply 122 days, with plans to run 1 million of them sooner or later. This got here after xAI raised $12 billion in funding final yr.
Nevertheless, it could additionally want over 1 gigawatt of electrical energy to energy these 1 million GPUs, in keeping with the report which cited Shaolei Ren, {an electrical} and laptop engineering professor on the College of California Riverside.
On high of this, the H100 chips price between $27,000 and $40,000 per unit, and the H200s price $32,000 per unit, which means that {hardware} alone with out the facility bills would price upward of $4.3 billion now and $27 billion for 1 million GPUs on the worth of the cheaper H100s, in keeping with the report.
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The Colossus venture total is estimated to price roughly the identical as estimates for prime competitor OpenAI’s Stargate amenities in Texas, which is a three way partnership between Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank.