Elon Musk’s ‘Gigafactory of Compute,’ the xAI Colossus, received approval from the Tennessee Valley Authority in early November to receive 150MW from the state’s power grid. This increases the site’s initial supply of 8MW by almost twenty times, triggering concerns from local stakeholders about how this much power demand from xAI would impact supply reliability and power prices across the Tennessee Valley. Furthermore, Power Grid International reports that Elon plans to double the site’s computing capacity, doubling the facility’s energy requirements.
xAI spent a Herculean effort to put up this supercomputer, which took the company only 19 days to set up (versus the four years it usually takes, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang). However, the site only had 8MW available at the time of its opening in July. So, Musk used massive portable power generators to meet the company’s needs. While Memphis Light, Gas & Water (MLGW) upgraded the existing substation to 50MW over the summer, running all 100,000 GPUs concurrently on the site is insufficient.
