How Elon Musk’s Supercomputer Freaked Out AI Rivals
Elon Musk has stunned rivals by building a supercomputer for xAI bigger and faster than ever before, fueling a race to supersize data centers by OpenAI and others.
On a sunny day last month, a propeller plane made multiple passes in the air over a large industrial building surrounded by grassy fields near downtown Memphis, Tenn., as its passengers snapped photographs and videos of the facility.
It was a secret reconnaissance mission. Elon Musk had recently converted the building from a former manufacturing plant for home appliances into a data center that housed one of the largest clusters of servers in the world for training artificial intelligence models. The speed with which Musk had built that AI supercomputer for his latest startup, xAI, had sparked anxiety and confusion among leaders at rivals such as OpenAI.
The passengers on the plane—employees of a data center competitor—were attempting to gain whatever insights they could about the operations of the closely guarded facility, according to someone with direct knowledge of the flight and photos viewed by The Information. They took note of the bevy of gas-powered turbines Musk had trucked in to provide the facility with power, and they looked for clues about how xAI was controlling the heat put out by the servers inside the building, the person said.