Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is embarking on an ambitious expansion in Memphis, Tennessee, with plans to significantly upgrade its supercomputer, Colossus. The enhanced facility will house at least one million graphics processing units (GPUs), according to a statement from the Greater Memphis Chamber. This represents a massive leap from the current setup, which features 100,000 GPUs used to train xAI’s AI chatbot, Grok.

As part of the upgrade, major tech companies will be involved. Nvidia, the primary supplier of GPUs for Colossus, will be increasing its presence in Memphis, alongside server manufacturers Dell and Super Micro, who have been tasked with assembling the server racks for the expanded supercomputer. These partnerships underline the scale of the project, which is a key step in xAI’s race to challenge AI giants like OpenAI.

Colossus plays a crucial role in advancing Musk’s AI ambitions, as he intensifies his rivalry with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Just last month, Musk expanded a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company and its partner, Microsoft, of attempting to monopolise the AI market.

xAI’s overarching goal is to use artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The company is led by Musk, who also heads Tesla and SpaceX. The xAI team has been instrumental in pioneering some of the most widely used methods in AI, including innovations like the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, and Transformer-XL. They have also contributed to significant breakthroughs such as AlphaStar, AlphaCode, and GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

The company’s work is overseen by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, who advises xAI on the development of its technologies. xAI collaborates closely with X Corp, bringing its AI innovations to more than 500 million users of the X app, ensuring that Musk’s vision for AI continues to reach a broad and growing audience.