xAI expanding Memphis supercomputer; Nvidia, Dell and more tech coming to city, Chamber says
by: David Royer, Shay Arthur, Associated Press
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — xAI is expanding its Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis in what local leaders say will position the city to become the “global epicenter of artificial intelligence.”
Additionally, tech giants Nvidia, Dell and Supermicro Computer will establish operations in Memphis, officials said.
xAI, in what is being called the largest capital investment in the region’s history, will incorporate a minimum of 1 million Graphics Processing Units. The computer is currently powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
The announcement was made by officials with the Greater Memphis Chamber on Wednesday, almost six months to the day after the announcement that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company was building a supercomputer in Memphis.
“When we announced six months ago that xAI would make Memphis its home for Colossus, we recognized it as our defining moment. Memphis has provided the power and velocity necessary for not just xAI to grow and thrive, but making way for other companies as well. We’re excited to welcome Nvidia, Dell, and Supermicro to the ‘Digital Delta’,” said Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber, in a news release.
The Memphis facility is “ramping up to about 320 jobs in this first phase,” Townsend said Wednesday, noting those are permanent jobs, not construction. “Our expectation is that the workforce will continue to grow at that pace.”
Townsend offered few details about the three other tech companies he said were bringing operations to the city, but said his team is working with the new companies to identify locations and discussing the scope and scale of their operations.
“But we know that this is going to represent thousands of high-tech jobs here in the Memphis community,” he said.
Townsend says a project of this scale attracts top talent, putting Memphis in position to lead the artificial intelligence race.
“Something like this has never been built before on our planet,” he said.
So what’s all this work actually going toward?
“This is serving the Musk companies, which includes SpaceX and Neuralink and X, and when you think of the computational power that’s going to be required and necessary to put humans on the surface of Mars — which is certainly one of their goals — that computational power is going to be generating and radiating right out of Memphis,” Townsend said.
xAI recently scaled up what it bills as the world’s largest supercomputer, Colossus, at a 271-acre site in southwest Memphis, just a few months after the public found out the company was considering the city for a supercomputer site.
Environmental groups have warned of the pollution generated from Musk’s AI data center in Memphis. The Southern Environmental Law Center, among others, says the supercomputer could strain the power grid, prompting attention from the Environmental Protection Agency. Eighteen gas turbines currently running at xAI’s south Memphis facility are significant sources of ground-level ozone, better known as smog, the group said.
Patrick Anderson, an attorney at the law center, said xAI has operated with “a stunning lack of transparency” in developing its South Memphis facility, which is located near predominantly Black neighborhoods that have long dealt with pollution and health risks from factories and other industrial sites.
The announcement of xAI and other companies in Memphis comes the same day as Meta, parent company of Facebook, announced a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center is coming to northeast Louisiana.
The U.S. Commerce Department found that there aren’t enough data centers in the U.S. to meet the rising AI-fueled demand, which is projected to grow by 9% each year through 2030, citing industry reports.
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