Elon Musk raced to build Colossus, the world’s largest supercomputer, in Memphis, Tennessee. He bragged that construction only took 122 days and expected that his biggest AI rivals would struggle to catch up.
Now xAI is facing calls to shut down gas turbines that power the supercomputer, as Memphis residents in historically Black communities—which have long suffered from industrial pollution causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy—allege that xAI has been secretly running more turbines than the local government knows, without permits.
Classic Felon Musk.
Ignoring laws on purpose, endangering the health of others, and lying everyone in the face about it while promising Bullshit.
Just look at his track record with the „Gigafactory" in California, where they have multiple EPA Clean Air Violations and more occupational accidents than other comparable factories, and also during the times it was run by GM&Toyota.
He also used political influence to keep OSHA out of his Nevada Factory.
122 days must be the time to construct the actual machine and not the building plus the machine, right? Shit, just the dirt work is about 3 months on the colos I’ve been working on in Wyoming. The electricians take about 6 months to work their way down the whole building of 5 colos, so a month for something the size of what’s in those pictures.
Cutting corners on power of that scale or the foundation holding up all that arc flash hazard is asking for trouble, IMO. And in WY they are using huge evaporative coolers but in TN they must need to use either liquid cooling or regular refrigerant AC systems because it’s so much more humid.
Gas turbines produce a lot of power, as in 1MW or more per turbine. Is this a backup system, or is the facility using so much power that they literally need their own electric plant to sustain it?
Power usage is actually going to be one of the big things that stands in the way of AI advances because AI requires obscene amounts of power. I’ve heard numbers like every query on an AI is equally to gallons and gallons of CO2 just being poured into the atmosphere. It’s extremely inefficient. If you’ve seen claims about EVs messing up the power grid understand it’s actually AI doing that and they’re trying to put the burden on consumers as always, same as all other green initiatives, it’s not the companies that are polluting that’s the problem but individuals, which is obviously not true
AI data centers use a LOT of electricity. Our systems are rated for 130 kilowatts per rack. Our minimal buildings are in the order of 40 megawatts. Elmo is most certainly not going to build anything that can compare with our midrange buildings.
It’s using that much power
it only looks like 8 are running
I don’t know anything about gas turbines, but I know enough about thermal imaging to know if they weren’t running they’d be the same temperature as everything else in the area.
