xAI Acquires 1 Million Sq Ft Property in Memphis

# xai # memphis

xAI, the AI company founded by Elon Musk, is making big moves in Memphis, Tennessee. They've just snapped up a massive 1 million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis to beef up their AI data center operations. This new spot will work hand-in-hand with xAI's existing data center in the city. Brent Mayo, xAI's senior site manager, is pretty stoked about the acquisition. He says it's all about keeping xAI at the cutting edge of AI innovation, right there in Memphis. Now, it's not totally clear if this expansion ties into a previous deal xAI made to lease a 522-acre site in Memphis. But one thing's for sure: xAI is on a mission to get its hands on more AI hardware. They've already built another data center in Atlanta, stuffing it with $700 million worth of chips and other gear. Plus, they've cut a deal with Dell to buy $5 billion worth of servers loaded with GPUs. All this hardware is crucial for training and running xAI's AI models, which they call Grok. The company's got big plans to upgrade its main Memphis facility, nicknamed Colossus, to a whopping 1 million Nvidia GPUs by the end of this year. That's a huge jump from the 100,000 GPUs it had last year. But not everyone in Memphis is thrilled about xAI's expansion. Some locals are worried it'll put too much strain on the power grid and make the air quality even worse. xAI is trying to smooth things over by giving the local utility discounted Tesla batteries and building a water recycling plant. To help pay for all these AI projects, xAI is reportedly in talks to raise another $10 billion. If that goes through, it would value the company at a cool $75 billion. Not too shabby, considering their last funding round in late 2024 brought in $6 billion.

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