xAI's reported plan to expand its Colossus AI supercomputer to a million GPUs has sent shockwaves through the tech world. This massive undertaking, estimated to cost $27 to $36 billion, would require energy equivalent to a nuclear reactor, highlighting the staggering power demands of cutting-edge AI.
Next year will see some truly monstrous compute projects get underway as the AI boom enters its third year. Among the largest disclosed so far is xAI's plan to expand its Colossus AI supercomputer from an already impressive 100,000 GPU s to a cool million.At $30,000 to $40,000 a pop, adding another 900,000 GPU s would set xAI back $27 to $36 billion. Even with a generous bulk discount, it still won't be cheap regardless of whether they're deployed over the course of several years.
Oh, and that's not even taking into account the cost of the building, cooling, and the electrical infrastructure to support all those accelerators. Speaking of power, depending on what generation of accelerators xAI plans to deploy, the GPU nodes alone would require roughly 1.2 to 1.5 gigawatts of generation. That's more than the typical nuclear reactor – and the big ones, no less. And again, that's just for the compute. Your gut reaction might be to chalk these figures up to an eccentric billionaire whose off-the-cuff quip was taken as gospel and then parroted by the local Chamber of Commerce as fact. However, when you take into consideration what the competition is doing, the scale of this new Colossus starts to look a little less crazy.The same week as the Greater Memphis Chamber dropped the details on xAI's reported expansion plans, rival model dev and Xitter competitor Meta announced a massive datacenter campus of its own. The facility, slated for construction in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will span 4 million square feet and cost $10 billion.From what we're told, the site will likely be built in phases over the next few years, and it'll consume a monumental amount of power. For reference, it's not unusual for a typical cloud datacenter campus with multiple data halls to have a rated capacity of around 50 megawatt
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