Elon Musk Gambles Billions in Memphis to Catch Up on AI

[douglas9]

MEMPHIS—For Elon Musk, ground zero of the artificial intelligence arms race is a 114-acre tract of grass and swamp on the state line of Tennessee and Mississippi.

This once-sleepy plot of land, filled with groves of water-rooted tupelo trees at its western edge, is now part of a growing empire Musk is accumulating in the Deep South, just a few miles from Elvis Presley’s homestead at Graceland.

Labor crews hired by Musk’s xAI were excavating power equipment on the site—a defunct energy plant just over the state line in Mississippi—and preparing to build a new plant capable of generating over a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power around 800,000 homes. Engineering permits show that Musk plans to route transmission lines that will connect the new power plant to a million-square-foot data center that is also under development just north of the border, in Tennessee.

Memphis is the front line of Musk’s costly foray into the AI wars. His artificial intelligence company, xAI, has already built one massive data center here in the Bluff City that it calls the world’s largest supercomputer. That facility, called “Colossus,” houses over 200,000 Nvidia chips and powers the technology behind the AI chatbot Grok. Now, Musk is close to finishing the second facility, which will be even bigger. He calls it Colossus 2.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-xai-memphis-tennessee-power-dec4c70d?st=jRLE8S

[Tanuki]

1. More from the OP link:

..."Musk’s data centers will probably bring in only a few hundred jobs to Memphis while consuming millions of gallons of water a day and more electricity than is needed to power all the city’s homes. Natural-gas turbines powering the data centers have brought pollution and controversy over their use—xAI has argued that many of the structures are temporary and don’t require a permit. Some residents question plans for the utility to issue rebates to xAI for building the new power structures it needs.
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Musk decided to name the data center Colossus—a reference to a popular trilogy of sci-fi novels from the 1960s by D.F. Jones, in which scientists built a supercomputer named Colossus that gained autonomy and plunged the world into war and chaos.
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The turbines were very large and emitted enough nitrogen oxides and other pollutants to require a permit from local authorities, according to an August 2024 letter from the Southern Environmental Law Center to the Shelby County Health Department reviewed by the Journal. But xAI wasn’t required to obtain a permit for them because the setup was supposed to be temporary, health officials said in July this year to the legal nonprofit.

In the poor, mostly Black neighborhoods of South Memphis near the data center, residents said they smelled the pollutants not long after xAI started operations."....(more)