MUSK GAMBLES BILLIONS IN MEMPHIS TO CATCH UP ON AI

xAI aims to win tech arms race with 'Colossus' data centers, thrown up at lightning speed

- Alexander Saeedy

xAI's data center in Bluff City. Musk's data centers will probably bring in only a few hundred jobs to Memphis while consuming millions of gallons of water a day.

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.

The AI arms race is shaping up as the most expensive corporate battle of the 21st century, with the belief that the first to the finish line will dominate the market, making speed crucial. Money also makes the difference: The more cutting-edge chips companies have, the smarter their models are. But at this stage it's unclear if or when the enormous investments will pay off.