Memphis seems to have found itself at ground zero in the artificial intelligence race and has the potential to become a technology hub.
On Wednesday, Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, announced that xAI’s supercomputer has doubled its processing power. In addition, the Elon Musk-owned company’s presence has attracted three more major technology companies interested in joining Bluff City: Nvidia, Dell, and Super Micro Computer.
The announcement was made during the chamber’s annual luncheon event at The Peabody in downtown Memphis.
“We’re building an AI race here in Memphis,” Townsend said.
Townsend declined to say how many jobs Nvidia, Dell and Supermicro will bring in total, only estimating that the companies aim to bring nearly 1,000 jobs to the Memphis area. The companies are also considering potential properties for staff and business use, but Townsend could not provide further details.
“Investments like this attract a lot of new talent,” Townsend said.
The xAI expansion is the second phase of the project and will add 320 new jobs. The first phase involved an estimated $6 billion worth of capital investment, Townsend said. Although no specific figures were given for future stages of capital investment, xAI has plans to expand its supercomputer to 1 million graphics processing units (GPUs).
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Brent Mayo of xAI and its affiliate CTC Property confirmed that the company’s Colossus supercomputer has doubled in size. Supercomputers currently use 200,000 chips. The computer went live in September and at the time used 100,000 Nvidia H100 processing chips, making it the world’s largest such computer.
During the event, Mayo quantified the processing power of computers and their practical applications in medical research. Mayo said the Colossus system can calculate cancer studies that would take more than 12 years to study in less than 4⅟₂ seconds.
Townsend said the xAI supercomputer is expected to serve as a data hub for Musk’s other companies, including X and SpaceX. xAI launched artificial intelligence hardware Grok-0 in August 2023.
In June, the Chamber of Commerce announced that xAI had selected Memphis for its new facility. The facility is located at 3231 Paul R. Lowery Road, the former site of Electrolux.
This story will be updated.
Neil Stbig is a journalist at Commercial Appeal. You can reach me at neil.strebig@commercialappeal.com, 901-426-0679, or via X: @neilStrebig.