Dell and Supermicro Team Up for Elon Musk’s xAI Supercomputer

Exciting news in the tech world: 

Dell and Supermicro (SMC) are on board to provide servers for Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer project. This announcement comes just over two weeks after Musk first unveiled the ambitious initiative.

Not a speculation!

The news was confirmed by both Musk and Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell on X (formerly known as Twitter). 

Michael Dell shared a photo of server racks with the message: “We’re building a Dell AI factory with @nvidia to power @grok for @xai @elonmusk.” 

Musk chimed in to confirm that Super Micro Computer is also part of the project, responding with a simple “SMC” when asked about the other half of the company’s ‘AI factory.’

Details on how the GPU clusters will be divided between Dell and Supermicro haven’t been disclosed yet. 

Earlier this month, Musk shared plans for what he’s calling both “the world’s largest and most powerful supercomputer” and a “gigafactory of compute.” This massive data center will be located in Memphis, Tennessee, and, according to Ted Townsend, president of the Greater Memphis Chamber, it will be the “largest multi-billion dollar investment in the city of Memphis’s history.”

Musk aims to have the supercomputer operational by fall 2025. He previously mentioned that xAI would deploy a 100,000 H100 liquid-cooled training cluster in the coming months, followed by an additional 300,000 GPU B200 cluster next summer. This machine will power the next version of xAI’s Grok chatbot.

Currently, xAI rents around 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs from Oracle Cloud and also utilizes Amazon Web Services along with spare capacity at X/Twitter data centers.

In a significant financial boost, xAI closed a $6 billion fundraising round in May 2024, valuing the business at $24 billion.

With these major tech players teaming up, the xAI supercomputer project is poised to make waves in the AI industry.