Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, aims to exponentially increase its computing power to the equivalent of 50 million Nvidia H100 GPUs within five years. This ambitious plan raises concerns about the feasibility of managing the energy demands involved.
Musk recently revealed that xAI's second Colossus compute cluster will soon launch with 550,000 Nvidia Blackwell AI accelerators, incorporating GB200 and GB300 chips. This development follows the existing Colossus 1 cluster, which operates over 200,000 H100 and H200 GPUs along with 30,000 GB200 units.
According to Wccftech, it's estimated that the creation of Colossus 2 could cost up to US$2 trillion, marking an unprecedented investment in AI development and highlighting a significant increase in industry hardware spending.
Tom's Hardware reports that 50 million H100 GPUs can achieve about 50 exaFLOPS for FP16/BF16 tasks. Considering efficiency improvements in new GPUs, xAI aims to use around 650,000 next-gen Feynman Ultra GPUs to reach its computing targets, significantly advancing AI hardware capabilities.
Energy demand is rising as industries develop rival plans to address efficiency and sustainability. Businesses are competing to adopt innovative technologies and renewable resources, aiming to reduce costs and carbon footprints. This race is reshaping markets and influencing global energy strategies.
The energy demand for 50 million H100 GPUs is expected to match the output of 35 nuclear power plants. Even with the efficient Feynman Ultra GPUs, xAI would still require approximately 4.7GW of power, significantly surpassing the 1.4 to 1.96GW used by the current Colossus 2 cluster. This gap underscores the difficulty of expanding AI computing power without straining energy resources.
Key players in AI are preparing significant hardware expansions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman aims to deploy one million GPUs by the end of 2025, with a long-term goal of up to 100 million. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans for AI data centers at a gigawatt scale, starting in 2026, with investments reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.
Article edited by Jack Wu
