Elon Musk raced to build Colossus, the world’s largest supercomputer, in Memphis, Tennessee. He bragged that construction only took 122 days and expected that his biggest AI rivals would struggle to catch up.
Now xAI is facing calls to shut down gas turbines that power the supercomputer, as Memphis residents in historically Black communities—which have long suffered from industrial pollution causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy—allege that xAI has been secretly running more turbines than the local government knows, without permits.
122 days must be the time to construct the actual machine and not the building plus the machine, right? Shit, just the dirt work is about 3 months on the colos I’ve been working on in Wyoming. The electricians take about 6 months to work their way down the whole building of 5 colos, so a month for something the size of what’s in those pictures.
Cutting corners on power of that scale or the foundation holding up all that arc flash hazard is asking for trouble, IMO. And in WY they are using huge evaporative coolers but in TN they must need to use either liquid cooling or regular refrigerant AC systems because it’s so much more humid.