Despite Elon Musk's announcement on Monday that xAI's Colossus 2 data center had reached a 1 GW scale, the supercomputer is not even close to that, a satellite image published by Epoch AI researchers reveals.
Based on 550,000 Nvidia Blackwell AI accelerators, xAI's Colossus 2 is advertised as the industry's first AI facility that consumes one gigawatt of power for AI inference and training. But for now, the data center codenamed 'Macrohard' purportedly only has 350 MW of cooling capacity — not nearly enough to cool down 550,000 Blackwell GPUs at full power, even in winter. As a result, Musk's Jan. 19 announcement may have been premature, to put it mildly. Epoch AI expects the supercomputer to reach 1 GW by May.
