The ‘most powerful AI training system in the world’ just went online

Elon Musk talks to the press as he arrives to to have a look at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin.Maja Hitij/Getty Images / Getty Images

The race for AI supremacy is once again accelerating as xAI CEO Elon Musk announced via Twitter that his company successfully brought its Colossus AI training cluster, which Musk bills as the world’s “most powerful,” online over the weekend.

This weekend, the @xAI team brought our Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online. From start to finish, it was done in 122 days.

Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world. Moreover, it will double in size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months.

Excellent…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 2, 2024

Recommended Videos

“This weekend, the @xAI team brought our Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online. From start to finish, it was done in 122 days. Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world. 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,” Musk wrote in a post on X.

Musk’s “most powerful” claim is based on the number of GPUs employed by the system. With 100,000 Nvidia H100s driving it, Colossus is estimated to be larger than any other AI system developed to date.

Musk began purchasing tens of thousands of GPUs in April 2023 to accelerate his company’s AI efforts, shortly after penning an open letter calling for an industrywide, six month “pause” on AI development.  In March of that year, Musk claimed that the company would leverage AI to “detect & highlight manipulation of public opinion” on Twitter, though the GPU supercomputer will likely also be leveraged to train its large language model (LLM), Grok.

Grok was introduced by xAI in 2023 in response to the success of rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama 3.1, and Claude. The company released the updated Grok-2 as a beta in August. “We have introduced Grok-2, positioning us at the forefront of AI development,” xAI wrote in a recent 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.”

Musk claims that he can also develop Tesla into “a leader in AI & robotics,” however, a recent report from CNBC suggests that Musk has been diverting shipments of Nvidia’s highly sought-after GPUs from the electric automaker to xAI and Twitter. Doing so could delay Tesla’s efforts to install the compute resources needed to develop its autonomous vehicle technology and the Optimus humanoid robot.

“Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead,” an Nvidia memo from December obtained by CNBC reads. “In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for [January] and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

Editors’ Recommendations

  • AI image generation just took a huge step forward

  • Meta’s next AI model to require nearly 10 times the power to train

  • Microsoft Copilot: how to use this powerful AI assistant

  • Musk promises to deliver ‘the world’s most powerful AI’ by later this year

  • Adobe Illustrator’s vector AI features just got a huge update




Related posts

Latest posts

2025 is going to be another big year for commercial moon missions

As soon as late February, a lunar lander will depart from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on its way to the

2025 is going to be another big year for commercial moon missions

As soon as late February, a lunar lander will depart from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on its way to the

You can officially download the TikTok app again on Android phones

TikTok is still absent from the Google Play Store. But the company is now letting users download the app officially on their Android phones.

I like the Galaxy S25 Ultra far more than I expected to

Samsung’s newest flagship has finally landed in stores and it would be easy to look at the as nothing more than an iterative upgrade that brings a few small upgrades to the table. However, as Andy covered in our , to do so would be to do a disservice to the overall experience. While reviewing […]

This adorable Noctua cooler completely transformed my gaming PC

I invested $60 in this tiny Noctua cooler, and it's made my small form factor gaming PC so much better.

Samsung’s ultra-thin Galaxy S25 Edge might get a monster camera

As per fresh leak, Galaxy S25 Edge will match the Galaxy S25 Ultra by serving a 200-megapixel camera, despite being the thinnest phone in Samsung's portfolio.

Spigen just accidentally leaked iPhone SE 4 renders

Case manufacturer Spigen has uploaded renders of the iPhone 4 SE (inside a case) to its website, and these renders line up with earlier leaks.

Fiio’s BTR13 is a budget DAC that lets you easily upgrade your phone audio

The BTR13 brings upgraded audio while still retaining the same focus on value.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra just broke new ground for Android flagships

A Samsung Galaxy flagship is back in the best-sellers club after six long years.

Fiio’s FT1 is the new king of budget headphones

With the FT1, Fiio is showing that it knows how to make incredible headphones on a budget.