MUSK’S COLOSSUS: HIS “NEW GOD” AT MEMPHIS
Just this last Monday you might recall that I blogged about a story that Google, Amazon, and various countries, have signed on to a pledge to triple the power output of the world by means of nuclear power production by 2050. The question was, "why?", and my answer was that they need all this power to run their planned AI datacenters and their new "digital" currency system and the "cashless" world, never mind the seiniorage costs of doing so, which (I also pointed out), they never mention in their proclamations of how wonderful all this will be. As I strongly intimated in that blog, I suspect the actual costs of such a system, when compared to the seiniorage costs of the current system of paper money and specie production, are ridiculous. The Bottom Line is, they need all the increased power consumption for something, and that something, I suggest, is for their Artificial Intelligence data centers, like Elon Musk's "Colossus" center outside of Memphis, Tennessee (this story shared by V.T., with our gratitude):
Notice the timeline of estimated energy usage toward the beginning of the article:
Dec 31, 2025: 1 million GPUs, 1,641 MW, 15,625 racks. [Can delay by 3 month or more as everything has to go right. 800K chips with delays beyond 1.2 GW]
Dec 31, 2026: 2 million GPUs, 3,281 MW, 31,250 racks.
Dec 31, 2027: 3 million GPUs, 4,922 MW (or 3,150 MW with efficiency), 46,875 racks.
Yes you read that correctly: by Dec. 31, 2027, the estimated racks in Musk's AI center will be over 46,000, and its power consumption will be up to a little less than 5,000 megawatts, or about 5 gigawatts. That's 5 billion watts.
As if that were not enough, take a gander at the amount of water needed for cooling all that heat that all those computer chips are generating, and to maintain functional temperatures:
13 million gallons/day (MGD) is ~9,028 gallons per minute (GPM).
For 1,650 MW (full B200 scenario), liquid cooling typically requires ~0.5–1 GPM per kW (per data center norms).
1,650,000 kW × 0.75 GPM/kW = 1,237,500 GPM (~1.78 MGD), well within capacity.
1,200 MW needs 900,000 GPM (1.3 MGD), also easily met.Answer:
Internal power for 1 million chips is ~1,387 MW with a mixed H100/H200-B200 setup, or 1,650 MW if all B200s. The planned 1,200 MW covers the former with adjustments or requires more power for the latter. Water supply (13 MGD) is sufficient for either.
Needless to say, all of this is going to cost money, and one commenter took the author of the article(Mr. Brian Wang) to task:
Brian, your price per B200 is completely off. The price is 30-40 000 USD per GPU, so that 1 million GPUs would cost 30-40 billion USD. And then there is course cooling, communication, and power and some CPsUs to run alongside the GPUs.
Where is xAI going to get 30-40 billion USD in 2025 for the GPUs?
Regardless of what the actual cost of all of this will be, the mere fact of the "gimongous" nature of the numbers themselves - gigawatts, thousands of gallons of water per minute, tens of thousands of computer chips, a building to house it all - suggest that this is a considerable amount of power of the political sort it gives its owner. And it raises again the question of why: in a "cashless digital currency" world, he who owns such centers controls the money, and does so in a way that was only a dream for Meyer Amschel Rothschild, for that very same system will presumably be able to determine, on a case to case basis, how much an individual's "money" is "worth" or even if it is usable based on his or her "score" against rules that the AI owner himself establishes.
Beyond this, I am reminded of the other dangers such a concentration of computer power, and hence, of political and economic and potentially even military power represents. In an editorial comment on the above article, Patrick Wood notes why Elon Musk named his computer center "Colossus":
Musk named Colossus after the 1970 science fiction horror flick, Colossus: The Forbin Project, where the US builds a military supercomputer that takes the US and the world hostage, threatening nuclear annihilation. Watch the movie. Musk is expanding Colossus with another 100 acre purchase in Memphis, TN, to scale Colossus up to 3 million state-of-the-art AI processors. Got power, Memphis?
One wonders just how much this facility might be behind the accomplishments of DOGE in tracking the fraud and inefficiency we've seen thus far, for it does not seem possible to me that all of this is being uncovered merely by computer experts with laptops. All that data is flowing somewhere, and my bet is that some of it is flowing here. Then there are other questions to be asked: what happens when there's too little power to go around? Who takes priority? Memphis? or Musk? And what happens when this center's AI confronts another AI in yet another center? Who gets caught in the "crossfire"? What happens when there's not enough water to go around? Who takes priority? Memphis? or Musk? and so on.
I suspect most of us know the answers to those questions already. We are indeed looking at skyrocketing energy requirements (and thus, at potentially skyrocketing energy costs) that are, indeed, llike the carbon footprint of a panzer division, and water usage amounts that would seem to require its own hydro-electric infrastructure, which, of course, Memphis, as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority, is part of. "Yes, we're very proud of our water reclamation here at Colossus, and we hope to have the Mississippi river flowing again soon." I jest, but I think you get the point.
I'd be impressed with DOGE's efforts if we saw someone actually being held accountable for the fraud, graft, grift, and corruption, but so far there have been no prosecutions. Instead, I fear we're looking at the ultimate in technofascism, a necessary component of a beastly infrastructure for a con-job pump and dump called a sovereign wealth fund... with "crypto-'currencies'". I'm not buying any of it. And if you think it is a good idea, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale... cheap... cash only, no crypto...
See you on the flip side...
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