Eduardo Duarte

BOOM 🚨 In about two months, a handful of buildings in Memphis will hold around 1.2 million Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, according to Elon Musk 🤯 To understand how massive that really is, you have to see it in real-world terms. These GPUs come in racks of 72, which works out to roughly 16,700 racks. Each rack weighs about 3,000 pounds, so the hardware alone tops 20,000 tons. That's about three Eiffel Towers' worth of iron, packed into a handful of buildings in Memphis. Powering it takes the energy of a major city. Once you count cooling and networking, each GPU pulls about 2 kW, so the whole site needs around 2 gigawatts. That's enough electricity for about 1.5 million American homes, which is several times the number of homes in all of Memphis. Then there's the raw computing power, and this is where it gets wild. At the 8-bit precision used for AI training, Colossus 2 can run about 6 sextillion calculations per second. If every person on Earth did one calculation per second, nonstop, it would take humanity more than 20,000 years to match what this machine does in a single second. And here's the kicker: this isn't even the finish line. Elon's stated goal for xAI is 50 million H100s' worth of compute by 2030, more than fifteen times everything you just read about.