xAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup led by Elon Musk, is dramatically expanding its compute capacity by purchasing a new data center building in Mississippi. The new facility sits next to the existing Memphis data center but crosses the state line to avoid local pushback, and it has been named "Macrohardrr," seemingly aimed at Microsoft (MS).
Musk said on X, the social network, on the 30th (local time) that xAI purchased a third data center building called "Macrohardrr." He said this will bring xAI's training compute capacity to nearly 2 GW.
The building is a warehouse of about 810,000 square feet, around 75,000㎡, and construction to convert it into a data center is set for next year. It also brings Musk a step closer to the plan to run 1 million GPUs (graphics processing units) in the data center.
According to a U.S. IT trade outlet, the newly purchased building is about 100 meters from the existing "Colossus 2" data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The two facilities are adjacent but straddle the state border, with Colossus 2 in Memphis, Tennessee, and the new building in Southaven, Mississippi.
Musk's choice to move across the state line is seen as an attempt to avoid the anti-xAI sentiment that spread in the Memphis area. Memphis residents and some in politics have argued that gas turbines powering the data center worsened air pollution. Mississippi, by contrast, is said to be relatively friendly toward xAI so far.
Still, some nearby residents in Mississippi have complained about noise from the power plant and construction, and xAI has reportedly installed a large sound barrier between the residences and the facility.
The new data center name, "Macrohardrr," appears to imply a step up from "Macrohard," the nickname for the existing "Colossus 2." It is a wordplay that twists MS's name—which can read as "small and soft"—into "Macrohard," meaning "big and hard," reflecting Musk's ambition to build software corporations that can compete with MS.