The billionaire founder of SpaceX plans to expand his Colossus supercomputer to compete with the AI giants because this expansion of the system will make it even more powerful.
Elon Musk wants to expand his artificial intelligence supercomputer, Colossus, to make it one of the most powerful in the world.
Through its AI startup, xAI, it announced its desire to compete with rivals such as OpenAI or Nvidia, adding more than one million graphics processing units (GPUs) to the supercomputer.
In this way, the billionaire founder of SpaceX could emerge as the undisputed winner in the fierce race to develop more capable AI models developed at greater speed.
Elon Musk Colossus: Beyond a Supercomputer
Elon Musk’s supercomputer, Colossus, was built three months earlier this year in Memphis, Tennessee, and currently has 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, which train Grok, the company’s chatbot. But the billionaire wants to go further, as he intends to scale the system to more than a million GPUs.
Although the expansion of this supercomputer will have companies such as Nvidia, Dell, and Supermicro Computer as allies. They have set up shop in Memphis to provide not only technical support but also hardware through an “xAI special operations team,” according to the city’s Chamber of Commerce.
For Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, there is only one person in the world capable of doing it, as he stated in an interview with B2g Pod: “Elon is unique in his way of understanding engineering, construction, large systems, and resource mobilization; it’s incredible.”
The goal of the race to develop more capable AI models is to build larger clusters of chips, but that comes with quite a few challenges. For example, GPU clusters consume enormous amounts of power and require advanced cooling systems.
At the moment, no details have been given about the energy resources they will use or where the energy will come from.
On the other hand, in addition to stocking Nvidia GPUs, xAI is developing its own custom AI chips. Elon Musk has been working on Tesla’s custom supercomputer, Dojo, since 2023, with the idea of training the capacity of its autonomous vehicles.
What is clear is that Colossus is not the only one; companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are also in the race to create more advanced AI systems. However, Musk’s approach, which combines hardware, software, and strategic vision, could give him a huge competitive advantage in this tech race.
