xAI brings Colossus, world’s ‘most powerful AI training system,’ online: Musk

xAI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, brought its massive AI training system, Colossus, online over the weekend.

The AI training cluster is powered by 100,000 of Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 GPUs, Musk said in a post on X. The process to build it took 122 days.

“Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world,” Musk said. “Moreover, it will double in size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months. Excellent work by the team, Nvidia and our many partners/suppliers.”

The battler for AI supremacy has escalated demand for Nvidia’s coveted processors.

Early this year, Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Instagram his company plans to have 350,000 H100 GPUs included in its AI infrastructure by the end of 2024. Meta released Llama 3.1 405B this summer.

xAI introduced the Grok chatbot last year, which competes with Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Last month, xAI released the beta versions of Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini.

“We have introduced Grok-2, positioning us at the forefront of AI development,” xAI said in a blog post. “Our focus is on advancing core reasoning capabilities with our new compute cluster. We will have many more developments to share in the coming months.”

xAI reached a valuation of $24B in its latest series B funding round this spring. Musk is also pushing for Tesla to invest $5B into xAI.