Musk to expand xAI's training capacity to a monstrous 2 gigawatts with third building at Memphis site — announcement comes days after Musk vows to have 'more AI compute than everyone else'

Elon Musk has revealed that xAI has purchased a third building in its Memphis, Tennessee, site near the Colossus 2 data center to expand its training capacity. The billionaire said on X that the structure will be named 'MACROHARDRR', an extension of his 'Macrohard' project, wherein Musk intends to build software completely from the ground up by solely using AI agents. This additional purchase will supposedly push xAI’s overall training compute capacity to a staggering 2 gigawatts.

The new building is just the beginning of the expected expenses, though. After all, xAI still must acquire the GPUs, power sources, and more for the site to be productive. And even though Musk is one of the richest people on earth, he’s still working to raise tens of billions of dollars to help fund it, as xAI is burning through over a billion dollars a month, as it races to build the most advanced AI on the planet.

Even though Musk is still working on the funding for the project, Nvidia has already reportedly signed a deal to deliver the needed GPUs for the site, helping him reach his goal of acquiring 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs in the next five years. Musk's ultimate goal, though, is to have more AI compute than everyone else combined, challenging Microsoft and other AI titans. Aside from acquiring the chips for the AI data center, the billionaire also needs to find a way to power it. It’s already been confirmed that Musk bought an overseas power plant and is shipping it to the U.S. To power Colossus 2. XAI has already set its sights on installing a gas turbine facility, which is set to supply 460MW from natural gas, helping the firm achieve its lofty compute capacity goals.

Although xAI is a relatively new entrant to the AI race, it quickly caught up with other, more established players like OpenAI due to the significant resources being poured into the project by Elon Musk. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even called his first Colossus project a “superhuman” effort, especially after the facility began operation after just 19 days — a feat that usually takes four years. But with other players in the AI game also spending billions of dollars on their own projects, it would be interesting (or terrifying, depending on your perspective) to see where all this expenditure will ultimately lead in the future.

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