Elon Musk says xAI is buying a power plant overseas that will be shipped back to the US to power the company's new data center.
Elon Musk on Capitol Hill. Photo: AFPElon Musk's next xAI data centers are expected to house millions of AI chips and consume so much electricity that xAI has bought a power plant overseas to ship to the US. SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel described xAI's recent progress in a podcast. Musk confirmed this in a later tweet.
XAI's current data center, Colossus, is one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, housing 200,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. It consumes about 300 MW of power. However, a big challenge awaits as the company moves forward with its next data center, which is expected to house 1 million AI GPUs.
Currently, xAI faces the challenge of providing enough power for Colossus. The main data center is located near Memphis, Tennessee, where it has installed 35 gas turbines that can produce 420 MW of power and uses a Tesla Megapack system to balance power consumption. In addition to building Colossus, xAI is rapidly acquiring and developing new facilities. The company has purchased a factory in Memphis and converted it into an additional data center. The factory has enough power to power about 125,000 eight-way GPU servers, along with all the supporting hardware, including networking, storage, and cooling.
However, with a data center containing a million Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, the power consumption is huge. The data center is estimated to consume between 1,000 MW (1 GW) and 1,400 MW (1.4 GW), depending on the AI acceleration models used and their configuration. In addition, GPUs are not the only things consuming electricity, but also CPUs, DDR5 memory, storage devices, networking devices, cooling systems, and air conditioning. In large AI data center clusters, the energy consumed by other devices often accounts for 30% to 50% of the power consumption of AI GPUs. A figure often expressed as PUE (power usage effectiveness). This means that Elon Musk's new data center with one million GPUs could consume between 1,400 MW and 1,960 MW (with a PUE of 1.4), which is equivalent to powering 1.9 million homes.
According to experts, the most feasible energy supply solution is to build many combined cycle natural gas turbine (CCGT) plants, each of which can produce between 0.5 MW and 1,500 MW. This is a fast-to-deploy option that can easily be integrated into the existing grid.
xAI is becoming a big energy customer. Colossus currently produces electricity on-site and buys it from the grid, so the company's next data center is expected to combine its own power plant with a grid connection.
(via Tom's Hardware)