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It looks like the AI race continues as it has been revealed that Elon Musk is quietly building a data center filled with $700 million worth of AI equipment.
It’s an operation big enough to rival OpenAI as Musk’s own startup xAI is expanding with a data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
xAI is planning to run the center along with X, formerly Twitter, with the two firms combining its hardware.
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The project has been nicknamed Colossus and Musk has claimed it is the largest data center in the world.
The Tesla boss’ AI startup has made a request to the Tennessee Valley Authority for the facility to be provided with 150 megawatts of power.
xAI debuted its own chatbot called Grok on X, with the first version being previewed in November 2023.
Early access to Grok was given to pay X Premium users and it was later revealed that the AI bot would be available exclusively to people who were paying for the higher tier of the Twitter subscription service.
The latest version of the AI, Grok-3, was released earlier this month on February 17.
According to Musk, this version is trained with ‘10x’ more computing power than the previous model.
Hundreds of data annotators have also been purchased to train the chatbot.
The billionaire hopes to use his new data center to put xAI in the position as a competitor that can stand against tech giants like Google and OpenAI.
Musk recently offered OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman $97.4 billion to buy the company, which was met with a flat ‘no’.
On X, Altman wrote: “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk, who bought Twitter back in 2022 for $44 billion, was quick to fire back, calling Altman a ‘swindler’.
There certainly doesn’t appear to be any love lost between the two billionaires as last year, Musk also sued both OpenAI and Altman.
In the lawsuit, Musk accused them of going back on promises to develop AI carefully and make it freely available.
He also claimed that they were breaching a contract by making the move towards profit.
The request by Musk for a court order to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company has not yet been ruled on by a judge.
However, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has said that she would not block the case from going to a jury trial.
