In December, one of xAI’s executives got up on stage in front of city leaders in Memphis, and announced that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company was working on an enormous expansion to the “Colossus” supercomputer facility it had recently put together to train its AI model, Grok.
The planned buildout would create an even greater colossus, a behemoth capable of housing a heaping 1 million Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)—a 900% increase to the 100,000 GPUs that xAI’s existing Memphis facility currently has.
But an important wrinkle has recently come to light that could affect Musk’s grand plans: Whether Memphis even has the power framework needed to support such a facility.
During a Memphis City Council meeting on Tuesday, the CEO of Memphis’ utility company warned that such an expansion might not even be possible without building new infrastructure.
“People can announce many things, and I think that's important for our community—that we get excited about opportunities that are coming. But as you know, there's pragmatic realities about a lot of things,” Doug McGowan, CEO of MLGW, the public utility that services the Memphis region, said during the meeting. He added later: “It is a physics problem, not a political problem, about how much energy can be provided here.”
McGowan emphasized repeatedly that there are limits to the number of electrons that can be transmitted along power lines without threatening local or even national service, and he spotlighted how his utility company is legally required to review and study each request for service in order to prevent these kinds of disruptions in service.
Also of note: xAI’s first facility isn’t even fully online yet. xAI has fired up temporary generators as MLGW works to accommodate the company’s initial power requests. MLGW has had to schedule construction for a new power substation, paid for by xAI, just to get the first 150 megawatts of power xAI has requested. And there’s a second request from xAI, for an additional 150 megawatts of power, that is still in review, though McGowan specified the review wasn’t done and it is still “uncertain at this time… when or if that load will come online.”
Without its initial power service yet online, xAI is now already publicly discussing a mega expansion of Colossus that could theoretically more than triple the amount of power it needs at that facility, depending on where xAI determines to expand. McGowan said that xAI has provided no formal details about what the expansion would entail, or where it will be located.
“They're not ready for us to study it. We're not ready to study it,” he said.
xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The boom in generative AI and the massive amounts of energy needed to power the services is straining electricity grids around the country and raising worries that it could set back efforts to reduce carbon emissions. MLGW gets its electricity supply from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which generates power through a combination of coal and gas-fired plants, hydroelectric, nuclear, and solar. The TVA says the electricity it delivers is 60% carbon-free.
McGowan pointed out that MLGW had “some success with the first phase” of xAI’s plans and that “we are excited, like everybody else, about the prospects.” But he noted that “we have a lot of people with big ideas” and was quick to point out there is only so much Memphis’ infrastructure can actually handle at the end of the day.
“We are dealing with the physical realities of what our utility system can provide,” he said.
