Musk's xAI Launches AI Cluster 'Colossus', Plans Massive GPU Expansion
Musk's claim to be the most powerful artificial intelligence computing cluster has gone online, and its scale will soon double.
On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on the X platform that the super artificial intelligence training cluster built by x.AI, an artificial intelligence startup under his control, has officially gone online. The cluster is named Colossus.
He revealed that the team spent 122 days completing the online process of Colossus. Colossus will also add 100,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) in the next few months, of which 50,000 will be the more advanced Nvidia H200, which means Colossus's computing power will double again.
On social platforms, the industry's response is very enthusiastic, calling it a huge achievement in artificial intelligence.
Cathie Wood, CEO of venture capital firm ARK Invest, congratulated the team on their achievements, calling them impressive, and revealed that xAI will have major progress to announce.
As early as the first half of last year, there have been continuous media reports that Musk is purchasing a large number of GPUs for Tesla. In May of this year, Colossus was first publicly disclosed and began operation in July.
In May, Musk revealed in a speech that xAI plans to build a supercomputer named Superfactory of Computing Power, which is expected to be four times the size of the strongest competitor in the market. The computer will use Nvidia H100 GPUs.
On July 22, Musk announced on X that the xAI team, X team, Nvidia, and other supporting companies had started training on the Memphis Supercluster, also known as Colossus, at 4:20 a.m.
Colossus is composed of 100,000 liquid-cooled H100 GPUs, running on a single RDMA structure (that is, Remote Direct Memory Access structure, which can solve the latency of server-side data processing in network transmission), and is the world's most powerful artificial intelligence training cluster.
Musk also added that the goal is to train the world's most powerful artificial intelligence by every metric by December of this year.
Of course, xAI's large model Grok will also be trained on its own Colossus.
In July last year, xAI announced its official establishment and stated that the company's mission is to understand the true nature of the universe. xAI stated on its official website, We are a company independent of X Corp, but will work closely with X, Tesla, and other companies to achieve our mission.
In November 2023, xAI released its first large model, Grok-1; on August 13, xAI announced that the test version of Grok-2 was officially online, and for the first time introduced image generation functions; Musk had previously revealed that Grok-3 would be trained using Colossus and is expected to be released by the end of the year, and he believes it will be very special.
Earlier this year, xAI announced that it had obtained a $6 billion Series B financing round, with main investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. xAI's pre-investment valuation was $18 billion, and the post-investment valuation after this round of financing will reach $24 billion.
However, while leading the artificial intelligence revolution, Musk has long been emphasizing the potential safety risks of artificial intelligence and actively promoting the implementation of artificial intelligence safety regulations.
Last month, Musk posted on X, saying he believes California should pass Senate Bill 1047. This move has caused controversy in the technology industry, with many people worried it may stifle artificial intelligence innovation in the United States.
It is reported that Bill 1047 requires some of the largest artificial intelligence models (costing more than $100 million) to report intelligent safety issues during development and submit reports assessing the risks associated with the model. Notably, the bill has already been opposed by xAI's competitor, OpenAI.