Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence startup xAI is building the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, with about a million GPUs. That much power will require a lot of electricity, but local power grids can only provide a fraction of the megawatts needed.
Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence startup xAI is building the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, with about a million GPUs. That much power will require a lot of electricity, but local power grids can only provide a fraction of the megawatts needed.
According to Business Insider, since June 2024, when the project was first announced, fourteen applications for a building permit have been submitted to the local planning and development agency.
Together, they add up to $405.9 million in estimated project costs. The documents also show that xAI won’t be able to get enough power from the local grid to run 1 million GPUs in Memphis, as Musk plans to do, unless it builds its own power plant on site.
Permit applications have been submitted for a range of electrical, mechanical, plumbing and other work, including the installation of $30 million in computer equipment and the construction of a $3.9 million perimeter fence that must withstand car crashes.
The latest permit application, submitted in January, concerns the construction of a new electrical substation.
Last year, it was reported that xAI was increasing the power of its Memphis supercomputer to at least 1 million GPUs. The «computing gigafactory» already contains 200,000 Nvidia GPUs and is considered the largest in the world, but the planned expansion will increase its GPU count by a factor of 10.
Musk and the Memphis city government said the billionaire’s choice of location for the data center that will power xAI’s Grok 3 is a «multi-billion dollar investment» that positions Memphis as a «global epicenter of artificial intelligence.»
Currently, xAI has requested 300 megawatts of grid capacity from Memphis Light, Gas and Water and has received approval for 150 megawatts.
In its permit application to install gas turbines on site, the company said that access to all 300 MW would depend on «significant infrastructure upgrades» and improvements to the region’s electricity transmission system. In the meantime, xAI is supplementing its power supply with gas generators from its subsidiary Caterpillar Solar Turbines. They produce a total capacity of 250 MW.
xAI cannot meet customer needs «without additional on-site power generation,» the company said in its permit application. TVA, which supplies electricity to most of Tennessee and parts of six neighboring states, said in February it plans to spend $16 billion over the next few years to meet historic load growth in its territory driven by electricity demand from xAI and other data centers and battery manufacturers expanding in the region.
According to Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside, powering one million GPUs could require more than 1 gigawatt of electricity, four times the amount that xAI in Memphis currently has access to.
In March, a company affiliated with xAI paid $80 million for 186 acres of land south of its original location. One of the parcels includes a one-million-square-foot industrial warehouse. xAI has asked TVA to evaluate the land for access to 260 megawatts of grid capacity.
Earlier, MLGW CEO Doug McGowan stated during a Memphis City Council meeting that the city’s power grid may not be able to provide power for a project of this magnitude.
Recall that Nvidia and xAI previously joined the AI Infrastructure Fund (backed by BlackRock, Microsoft, and AI investment group MGX). They signed a $30 billion contract for the AI Infrastructure Fund.
