xAI to build massive AI data center in Saudi Arabia
What's the story
Elon Musk, the CEO of xAI and Tesla, has announced a new data center project in Saudi Arabia. The facility will be built in partnership with HUMAIN AI, a Saudi Arabian company backed by the country's sovereign wealth fund. The 500-megawatt (MW) data center will use NVIDIA's computing chips to power its operations.
Project scale
World's largest data center outside US
The new data center will be one of the largest outside the US, surpassing xAI's Colossus 1 in Memphis, which has a computing power of around 300MW. The announcement comes just after NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed a 100MW data center for Amazon Web Services (AWS), also powered by NVIDIA chips.
AI collaboration
US-Saudi AI MoU and Musk's vision for future
The announcements come after the US and Saudi Arabia signed a new AI Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The agreement gives Saudi Arabia access to leading American systems while safeguarding US technology from foreign influence. At the event, Musk shared his vision of a future filled with robots and space-based AI data centers.
Future predictions
Musk predicts solar-powered AI satellites for computing
Musk also predicted that in the next four to five years, the most cost-effective way to do AI computing would be with solar-powered AI satellites. However, he initially overstated the size of xAI's data center project, saying it would be a 500-gigawatt (GW) facility, about 10 times bigger than what the world currently consumes in data center energy.