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.
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