Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has reportedly chosen Memphis as the location for its planned creation of the biggest supercomputer in the world, dubbed "Gigafactory of Compute."
Memphis to Host xAI's Supercomputer
Fox Business reported that the Greater Memphis Chamber announced on June 5 that the city in southwestern Tennessee had been selected to host the project. Notably, the project is expected to be the greatest capital investment in the city's history, made by a new-to-market firm.
The plan, however, still requires approval from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Memphis and Shelby County Economic Development Growth Engine, and other entities.
Upon finishing Phase 1, the AI company intends to provide high-quality employment opportunities, with the possibility of more considerable investment in subsequent stages.
"Memphis is a city of innovators, so it's no surprise that it feels like home to those looking to change the world," said Memphis City Mayor Paul Young.
xAI Supercomputer Aims to Improve Grok Chatbot
The purpose of the xAI's supercomputer is to make the Grok chatbot far more powerful. Using 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), the proposed supercomputer would be about four times bigger than the biggest GPU clusters currently in use.
According to Elon Musk, this massive computing power is necessary for the next version of Grok. Grok 2, the most recent version, was trained using 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The planned expansion seeks to double the training capacity in preparation for the upcoming Grok 3 model.
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