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It seems like Elon Musk‘s new project simply sprung up out of the ground.
The Colossus center, the biggest of its kind in the world, is now a reality. It’s drawing massive amounts of power every day, and running strong, ostensibly in order to power a new version of the Grok AI model.
Technology analysts marvel at the speed of the implementation, and the data center’s comparative size. Some locals are worried about lack of traditional planning and paperwork. And competitors are decidedly nervous, partly because of XAI’s use of Nvidia hardware as that company soars to the top of the heap on the stock exchange.
With that in mind, let’s look at three big topics of interest around this unprecedented project.
1. It Happened Quick
Earlier this week, I was listening to the remarks of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (that were eventually picked up by tech media) as he talked about the data center, with its 100,000 GPUs, being stood up in a number of weeks, not months. The metric ’19 days’ is being thrown around based on Huang’s comments, while Musk has reportedly used the time frame of 122 days.
That’s a new idea in a field where there’s typically quite a lot of planning time involved.
When you go to check those numbers, you get a sort of barrage of responses, including some that look like AI actually wrote the website.
However, you can just ask ChatGPT and get this:
“XAI constructed the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, over a period of 122 days. This rapid development was achieved through collaboration with Supermicro, which provided the necessary hardware and infrastructure. The Colossus supercomputer, equipped with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, began operations in July 2024. This swift construction timeline underscores xAI’s commitment to advancing artificial intelligence capabilities.”
Yes, that’s pretty quick.
2. Drones Over My DC
Let’s start with this: why would someone want to drive a drone over the Colossus data center?
Outlets like The Verge and The Information are reporting that competitors are using drones to get at least an exterior look at what XAI is doing in order to try to anticipate its impact on the market.
That leads people to ask whether it’s legal to fly drones over a data center at all. The common response seems to be that while it doesn’t violate local ordinance or specific federal statute, it does violate FAA regulations and guidelines.
There are also other lawfare issues attached to the Colossus project, including the fear of pollution, and XAI’s use of massive amounts of water to cool the data center.
This is, in fact, shaping up to be a significant part of reporting around a project that, is by anyone’s standards, big and prominent in today’s tech media.
3. Did XAI Use Colossus to Build Colossus?
This one might seem like a little detail, but it’s important in understanding how AI is going to impact our own journalism and personal research.
I would call this “the double naming problem.”
In researching Colossus, I came across this web page for a data center consulting firm, interestingly named Colossus.
Now just to help set the stage: this is similar to someone researching the career move of a professional from Meta’s AI department to work on OpenAI‘s new Orion model, and finding that Meta’s prior AR wearables campaign, which would make use of new models, was also called Orion.
Simply put, it’s confusing.
Now, suppose that a journalist (or anyone else who’s looking into the matter) wants to know if Colossus was consulted in order to build Colossus.
The company itself only has a web field for contact. There’s no phone number. So it’s impossible to verify that in the normal human way that a journalist would have operated in, say, 2018.
In fact, AI might have an easier time filling out that form, and sending it, and looking for a response.
Meanwhile, if you put the question into ChatGPT, you come up with this:
“There is no publicly available information indicating that XAI utilized the services of the advisory firm Colossus in the development of their Colossus data center. The Colossus data center, located in Memphis, Tennessee, was constructed in collaboration with Supermicro, which provided the necessary hardware and infrastructure. The advisory firm Colossus specializes in data center site selection, asset conversions, sustainable development, and investment strategies. However, there is no evidence to suggest that XAI engaged this firm for their data center project.”
You might say that’s ‘close enough for government work.’ You can cite this response in saying that you couldn’t find any public information linking the advisory firm to the project. And then you can wash your hands of the whole thing, and go on to whatever is next.
The bottom line is that as this groundbreaking project evolves at a whiplash speed, it’s also getting a lot harder to report on what’s happening in the tech world, and digital forms of traditional news media are competing with the products of AI itself for human attention. All of that is important in the context of what Colossus will actually be doing with all of that data. Stay tuned.
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