The arms race in the field of artificial intelligence has once again reached a milestone. AIbase learned that Elon Musk has officially announced that the supercomputer "Colossus2," specifically designed to power the AI chatbot Grok, has gone live. This is not only the latest technological achievement of xAI company, but also the world's first AI training cluster with a scale of gigawatts (GW).

image.png

This "power monster" located in Memphis is astonishing in scale. AIbase learned that the facility covers an area equivalent to 13 football fields. Starting with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs from the summer of 2024, the number of graphics cards has doubled to 200,000 by February 2025. According to Musk's grand blueprint, the power capacity of Colossus2 will be expanded to 1.5 GW this April, with the ultimate goal of reaching 2 GW. This level of energy consumption is enough to rival the electricity usage of most major cities in the United States.

However, this pursuit of extreme performance also comes with significant energy pressure and environmental controversy. To ensure stable operation, xAI even配备了150 megawatts of Tesla Megapack batteries as backup power. At the same time, AIbase noticed that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently ruled that the data center operated dozens of natural gas turbines during the power supply period, determining that its actions violated relevant environmental regulations. Behind the rapid growth of computing power, how to balance super computing power with environmental responsibility has become a long-term challenge that Musk must face.

Key points:

  • 🚀 First global gigawatt cluster: Colossus2 is officially online, marking the entry of AI infrastructure into the gigawatt era, with the final power supply scale reaching 2 GW.

  • ⚡ Massive hardware scale: The cluster is powered by 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and its energy consumption is enough to support the daily operations of a large city in the United States.

  • ⚖️ Involved in environmental controversy: Due to the illegal operation of natural gas turbines, xAI has been found to have violated environmental regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, highlighting the growing regulatory issues of large data centers.

-