Colossus 1

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I'm PJ vote. 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The high speed fiber in the ground, but also these big, empty buildings that had been built before the Dockham bubble burst. And so, Buddy presented his idea to the board. Let's find some rich tech companies to fill the buildings, and that is where we will get our tax base. I remember sweating through my suit, thinking, you know, how am I trying to sell this? And one of the board members looked at me and said, Mr. Reiser, I don't understand why we need data centers if everything's going to the cloud. And I'm just like dumbfounded because, well, obviously, the cloud is in the data centers. It's not really in the clouds, right? Right. It's funny to Buddy, this is just an amusing anecdote, but I found myself thinking about it a lot here in Virginia. What we call a new technology really shapes how we understand it. The name, the cloud, picked probably to make us feel safe, to make us feel like we're not putting our data in trust in other people's computers. The name also has this side effect of making you forget that the internet isn't a thing that's invisible in the sky. It's very physical. It's made of cables and servers that all have to be put somewhere. Buddy, explain this to the board member. And then you hit the road, pitching big tech companies on loud end. We've never given one dollar of local incentive money data centers to bring them here, not one dollar. What we did, part of our pitch was we understand data centers. We know how to get them to market. We're going to make it fast. We're going to make it predictable. And that was the pitch. That's what I was out on the road selling to Amazon and Microsoft and Google and all the rest of them. The pitch worked. Every tech company under the sun would arrive. The big ones, the new ones, many you've never heard of. And as the cloud grew, invisible to most of us, people in the loud and could see all these concrete boxes blooming across the landscape. When the cloud started to take off, I really say about 2017 is when that really took off, then we had a real big growth spurt there. Then when COVID hit and everybody started working from home and we were stuck watching TV and we were streaming videos and we were communicating and learning and working and everything through the internet, all of a sudden there was another growth spurt. You had no idea. You were seeing the internet from a completely different angle than the rest of us. Yeah, and we were seeing that demand and there's not been a single day without data center construction in loud and for going on two decades now. That's pretty crazy. You know fast forward from 2007 to 2025, we've been able to lower our tax rate by 48 cents on the dollar. We had 10 straight years where we were building elementary schools, middle schools, and one high school. 10 straight years we were doing that and that money comes from the data centers. You know, we'll get a billion dollars in local tax revenue from the data centers this year. I do need to fact check buddy here. The county made almost a billion dollars from data centers this year, 895 million to be exact. That enormous amount of money is perhaps why even though you do find people in loud and complaining about the data centers, nobody wants a new transmission line going through their backyard, the general sentiment seems tolerant. Chapter two inside the cloud. No principal, you can describe what you see but you will never ever say the name of what you see. Michael Whitwalk, general manager of the Sabie data center in Ashburn, he's actually much friendlier than he sounds over here. That area is still, it's all for them as no matter what you want. That's what's not an issue. The main thing that Michael is trying to keep secret is the names of the companies that are renting server space here. I asked why those names were so secret. It was indicated to me via hand gesture that that is also a secret. Okay, that's fine. But Michael was otherwise happy to show us how this cloud data center functions. And what I'm going to show you today. The giant block of a building is organized in layers, kind of like an onion. We're here on our loading dock adjacent to our generator yard. The outer layer outside the building is all the power infrastructure. So there's this power substation pulling electricity from the grid. If you look over top of those colors, you'll see a giant substation. This is the wax pool substation. Virginia's data centers use a ton of electricity. Nearly 40% of the state's estimated power use this year will be just for data centers. However, most of the air pollution being created by that power generation, that pollution is not actually happening in this county. It's happening elsewhere in other parts of Virginia or other states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, because that's where the grid is pulling power from. So here today, the skies are blue. The air is clear and the people of Loudon County are not dealing with the side effects of their power needs. Inside the building, Michael shows us the next layer of the onion, the cooling layer. So we have now gone into what we call the Craig gallery, this computer room air handler. These are the long rooms filled with industrial air conditioning fans, each one about my height, with a maze of metal tubes, sneaking cold water in and hot water out. And are they usually people working in here as usually this empty? It's empty until we have maintenance going on in here. Have you seen the TV show Severance? I have not. We look like we're walking through the sets of Severance. It's just like these endless halls with fluorescent lighting and every door looks like the other door. And I imagine it's easy to get lost. This is our longest hallway in the facility. I'd say this is a quarter mile. It's a nice long. I thought about what it would be like for some future archaeologists finding the remains of this building long after we're gone, after the internet's been shut off. What would they think this is for? I realize the place reminds me a little of photos of scene of the insides of pyramids, a labyrinthine enormous tomb. Do a lot more people want to see data centers these days? It's always been a hot spot, but yeah, it just makes it that much more like, hey, what's going on? This is very loud. You're in what we call our MPOE. It's our main point of entry. This is where the 5th of every night, this is the next layer, where all the fiber enters the facility. And finally, we get to the most important layer of all, so we're entering a data hall, the heart of the building, the place where the computers actually live. I'm going to give you up and close personal, on a place that everybody doesn't get to see, so you're special. I'm going to give you 30 seconds. I get 30 seconds to stand here, amidst the tall white stacks, walking behind one of those stacks, I see an actual server rack. A metal framed rectangle, the kind you'd glimpse in the IT closet of your office holding the stack of servers. An unremarkable hunk of metal, but this is where the cloud lives. It's funny, I spent most of my work days living inside of a Google Doc, but before this story I'd never thought about the back end that enabled that. Like, every time at the office, I type a single letter, say, an X into a doc. That X gets transmitted over my Wi-Fi to the router, where it jumps to my internet service provider's fiber onto a fiber optic highway, and ultimately to a data center like this one, to a room like this one, to a server like the one I'm looking at. The data center is infrastructure, and like most infrastructure, or water lines or sewage it's both an engineering miracle, but also so reliable as to render itself boring. It works. So we don't notice it. For years, that's what data centers were. Boring miracles that nobody except, of course, BuddyRizer ever really thought much about. And then in late 2022, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, quietly released a chatbot that would upend our understanding of the internet. ChatGPT. And almost overnight, a data center would take on a different meaning. Instead of being boring old pieces of internet infrastructure, now data centers are being used to train AI, which makes them territory in a war, an enormous, expensive, ego-driven war waged by tech billionaires. After the break, Prometheus, Stargate, Colossus. You want to send me to Michael Thompson who bucked the whole A.B. dropped out and testified against them. And you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? What are you? He has created this illusion of who he is. I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this with an ex-gang leader. I was in the hearing and I thought, oh my goodness, these girls are fallen for his bullshit. I think they're going to let this guy out. The world would be a much better place with this man out. It's like a light just kind of pours out of him. And I was determined to help that light get out into the world. Oh. Blood memory. A new podcast series from Love and Radio. Search for Blood Memory, wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter three, Arms Race. So when you first got assigned the cloud computing beat, what did you think? I thought that I did not know how I was going to make cloud computing interesting to the reader or to myself. And so it was sort of a let me do this niche boring thing for a little bit before I switch beats. And now I'm like this is going to be my beat for a long time. Anisa Gardese is a reporter at the information. She'd been assigned the cloud beat in early 2023. Lucky for her, this was the exact moment when this formerly sleepy part of the tech world was beginning to explode. Open AI had just a couple of months earlier released chat GPT. And everyone was going crazy. How did they do that? This is such a breakthrough. We have to catch up. Tonight we're taking a deep dive into the world of AI with a special focus on chat GPT. Chat GPT, which stands for Generative Pre-Train Transformer. And it's fully powered through artificial intelligence just rolls off the tongue. Uh-huh. Too many of us now to talk about it. For most consumers, honestly, even for most tech reporters, chat GPT came as a total surprise. But like most overnight successes, it had been building for years. Back in 2012, a small group of academics had trained a model that was unusually good at classifying images. It could distinguish, for instance, between different breeds of dogs. The academics trained this primitive neural network using more than a million images. But their big innovation was that they'd handled the computing load with a particular kind of chip. A graphic processing unit. A GPU. A GPU specifically from a company called NVIDIA, which most people at the time associated with video games. The academics built their little neural network using just two of these Nvidia chips. They won a contest, and they published a paper announcing that this was possible. OpenAI spent the years between that paper and Chat GPT's release, applying that insight that you could build more powerful neural networks by feeding them more training data and wiring together more and more GPUs to process it all. In 2012, the academics had used two Nvidia chips. By 2020, OpenAI had partnered with Microsoft to connect 10,000 Nvidia chips. Just a couple years later, they were reportedly up to 20,000 chips, which is how they were able to train Chat GPT 3.5, the chatbot that would take the internet by storm. Once AI started taking off, it became clearer that to train these massive models that companies like OpenAI needed to train, they needed an enormous amount of GPUs all in the same space. The data center setup that Microsoft had built for OpenAI, it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in packed with GPUs, and that was now the exact kind of setup that everybody else wanted. And what would have happened in the earlier cloud era is that the biggest cloud providers, like Google and Amazon, would have just built those kinds of data centers and rented compute to everybody else. But now, in the AI era, these companies seemed more preoccupied with competing with each other. OpenAI developed Chat GPT on Microsoft's cloud, and so you had Amazon and Google looking around the room and figuring out how they could catch up with Chat GPT. And so the issue that they were facing was that they were buying so many Nvidia GPUs, but they had to decide how many are we going to rent out to our customers, and how many are we going to keep for our internal AI teams, because Microsoft just one-up dust with Chat GPT. I see. So it's like, they realize that's a way to almost knee cap their competitors. Like, if you're Google, you might be thinking, I have GPUs, but if I save more of those GPUs for myself, for my own developers, then in a way that is like a competitive advantage. Exactly. They were very much, you know, some people would use the word hoarding, but they were they were definitely keeping large amounts of the Nvidia GPUs for their AI research teams. Again, Chat GPT was a huge surprise to us normal people, but what you can't lose sight of is what it meant to companies like Google and Meta, giants that typically dominate the internet, but who this time had been caught have a sleep. Overnight, the big tech companies wanted their own powerful chatbots, and they were hungry now for GPUs to try to quickly train those chatbots up. This is where our current data center construction boom begins. Amazon plans to spend $10 billion to build data centers. To propose a $165 billion data center, you know, we'll invest hundreds of billions of dollars into a two-invest and initial $100 billion, but it could be up to half a trillion over the next four years. These new AI data centers would be gargantuan. Much bigger than any built in loud and in the cloud era, and they would have grand names pulled out of myth and science fiction. The kind of names you'd expect to see slapped on the side of a star destroyer. This is the site of Project Star Trek. Now, the project is called Project Jupiter. Project Zodiac. Prometheus coming online, he says in 2026, there's also Hyperion that he says will scale to five gigawatts over several years. It's hard to put that in context. These data center projects together will cost trillions of dollars. All spent really on the same gamble. The tech moguls have tied the future of their companies, as well as an oversized portion of the American economy, to the notion that all of this in the end will make sense. And while I do not have access yet to information about the future, I started to take a closer look at these enormous data center projects. Trying to figure out for myself, does it make sense? Could it make sense? I ended up focusing on one, the biggest and baldest of all data center projects, the first of its kind from a total upstart in AI. A tech CEO who has never met a race, he did not want to win. Elon Musk is starting a new company to get into the field of artificial intelligence. Musk announced the launch of XAI today. He says the chapter four is to focus. Elon enters the ring. In the summer of 2023, eight long months after the big chat GPT release, Elon unveils his AI startup. According to its website, the new company will work with Twitter, Tesla, and other companies to understand the true nature of the universe. If the AI race is defined by founders making incredibly hyperbolic claims about what their chatbots are going to do to society, Elon, of course, out hyperbole it them all. So the mission of XAI and GROC is to understand the universe. We don't understand the nature of the universe, so we can figure out what's going on, where are the aliens, what's the meaning of life, how does the universe end, how did it start, all these fundamental questions were driven by QRIA. To most of the people who had been following the AI race, Elon Musk did not seem like the entrant bet on. It wasn't just the overly lofty promises. It was that unlike the competitors, Elon was a have-not. He did not have his own data centers. He did not have a big head start. Here's Anisa. One of the biggest questions I had was how could they possibly catch up to open AI? I think a lot of people were questioning, how is this startup that doesn't have a lot of money going to get enough GPUs to train AI that's even competitive? If they don't have a large data center, and they don't push out their training runs as quickly as possible, open AI is going to get even more steps ahead of them. Musk had to prove that even though they relate to the game, that they could catch up and be competitive. I should say here, we emailed XAI for comment on the story, and we received their standard auto response, quote, legacy media lies. They were not going to talk to us. However, Elon Musk has talked publicly about XAI a fair amount. For instance, the day he announced his startup, he seemed to echo what Anisa just said, that he was beginning this race from far behind. XAI is really just starting out here. It will be a while before it's relevant on a scale of the sort of open AI Microsoft AI or the Google D-Mind AI. Those are really the two big gorillas. For Elon to catch up to the big gorillas, he had to very quickly train up his young chap bot, GROC. Elon believed that the more GPUs GROC was trained on, the more intelligent it would be. So you wanted 100,000 GPUs just to start. On another live broadcast, Elon talked about what happened next. How you went around to companies like Oracle to ask how quickly they could give him the setup that he wanted. We actually weren't intending to do a data center ourselves. We went to the data center providers and said how long would it take to have 100,000 GPUs operating coherently in a single location. We got time frames from 18 to 24 months. We're like, well, 18 to 24 months, that means losing as a certainty. So the only option was to do it ourselves. The only option was to do it themselves. It was a moonshot. Elon obviously had never built a data center himself. Because he wanted to build something faster than anyone thought was possible, he decided to try something new. He would find an existing building, an abandoned factory with immediate access to a lot of electricity. And then he would engineer a way to cram that structure full of envidio chips. For that plan to work, the factory would need to be in a place willing to cooperate and cooperate fast. Recently, producer Garrett Graham and I flew down to one such city, Memphis, Tennessee. Where we visited a white spacious office. Through a big window, I could see the river. We were about to meet the person in charge here. So let me start by just having you introduce yourself. So tell me your name and what you do. Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber. Ted, a very stylish man, dappersuit, prayer beads on his wrist. Ted is to Memphis a version of what Buddy Riser is to Lab and County. His job is to convince companies to set up shop here. And in particular, there was an empty factory by the Mississippi river that he and his team had been trying to fill. We'd been marketing this site in Memphis that was home to Electrolex. A very large factory previously used for producing kitchen ovens. 800,000 square foot facility that they had the commission that moved out of. Great space. It was probably one of the hottest buildings in the southeast market. We were showing it to a lot of companies, a lot of major brands. And give me a sense just for a little bit of context, because again, it's my first time in Memphis. How much did the city need economic development? Oh, it's an industrial need of that. When you consider going back to the 2008 recession, it took Memphis 10 years to recover from that recession. And that was four years longer than the national average. And we've had generational poverty in some neighborhoods in our community. And we want to solve for that. Memphis did have some old school industry. There's a steel plant in town, an oil refinery. FedEx has had quartered here. But Ted is particularly interested in tech. The part of the American economy that year after year still seems vibrant. He was interested in tech, but tech companies had not been as interested in Memphis until March of 2024. When Ted learned that a mysterious tech company was asking after the old of in factory, as his meeting invitation started getting accepted, he could see the email domains at neuralink at SpaceX at x.com. Ted says this first encounter with reps from across Ewan's hydra-headed tech empire, it was exhilarating. And within days, he got word that Ewan himself wanted to meet. It was incredibly thrilling. You open up your, on my case, my iPad and the boxes start to populate, you know, in the virtual meeting and there in the top left corner of my screen is Elon Musk. And it was a, a similar moment. It was a pass or fail, right? Someone like Mr. Musk moves quickly. He discerns information rapidly. And he was focused on making a decision very quickly. So I was told by his team to, you know, do your thing, Ted. Sell Memphis and then handed over to the utility partners to talk about power. And so I began and Elon quickly cut me off and said, I don't need to be so on Memphis. I want to talk about power. And I thought I messed up. But handed it over very quickly to my great partners. And we ended it. I was still a little uneasy about how abruptly I didn't get a chance to sell Memphis. But I got over that when it was Sunday night. We got the call that he had given the green light to his team to go with Memphis. So in a week's time, we had won that project. You know him for X, Tesla and SpaceX. But now Elon Musk is coming to Memphis to build the world's largest supercomputer. And unlikely story of the ever was one. Chapter five. Play to win or don't play at all. Elon Musk would name his data center colossus, reportedly after a science fiction novel from the 60s in which scientists build a super computer named Colossus, which later enslave humanity. The Memphians were just going to call it a super computer. Whatever it was, whatever it was going to be, a science fiction future had arrived in the Mississippi Delta. Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber says, this is single handedly the largest multi-billion dollar capital investment by a new market company in Memphis history. Ted held a triumphant press conference. This monumental recruitment investment marks a pivotal point in our city's trajectory and will drive continued entrepreneurship and ingenuity propelling Memphis to the forefront of global innovation and competitiveness. So, Memphis, are you ready? Let's go. Colossus could bring tens of millions in much needed tax revenue for Memphis. But for all of this to work, Memphis had to move fast. Not city government fast, not even tech company fast. They had to move at Elon Musk's definition of fast. The city and county would grant permits at record speed, put agreements in place for power and water. Elon's people would gup the inside of the oven factory and bring in racks to house Nvidia GPUs. Even before Ted had publicly announced the project, he remembers touring the construction site with Elon and being astounded at the rate of progress. Everyone was just amazed at what was built. You know, Elon did have his phone out and he was taking videos and I was texting my team back here at the chamber. I was like, has he posted? Has he posted? So, he did not. But I was invited into a room where it was after the tour and everybody sits and Elon is standing at the front and he's pacing just a little bit and there's a hush that falls over the room and he says we're going to haul ass in Memphis and he thrust his fist in the air and he says, LFG and he said it just like that. He didn't, you know, he used the letters. It gave me chills. As a mumpian, I was witnessing history and then from that one visit, he decided that very day we're going to double it. We're going to use the rest of this building to double it in size. So, you're talking 200,000 Nvidia chips. I got to visit Memphis. Yeah, yeah. You go on big on compute. Yeah. You've also said play to win or don't play at all. So, yeah. What does it take to win? For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute. Elon appeared on the Lex Friedman podcast that summer in 2024. He talks about the Colossus build. He describes being on the ground there and how he actually did some of the cabling himself. They try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing. I try to do it at least a few times myself. So, connecting fiber off to cables, diagnosing a multi-connection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling. So many cables. This one episode is eight and a half hours long, which leaves the two of them plenty of time to nerd out on the complexity of Colossus' cabling. That was a crazy cable out. It looks pretty cool. Yeah. It's like the human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see. Yeah, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is different to cables. Yeah. So, there's something about just listening in on Elon taking a break from his data center sprint to sit for one of Lex Friedman's interviews, the two expressing wonder in matching monotones. It's easy to make fun of them and I might be just a little bit. But the truth is the thing that they are describing is remarkable. I looked at a photo posted on the XAI account showing the Colossus interior, this meticulous Byzantine setup. And while I did not see a human brain, I do see something new and impressive. Rose of tightly packed dense yellow cables, which line the ceiling. It's a much more complex interior than the data center I saw in Loudon with a much more elaborate cooling system. GPUs run very hot. And so instead, Colossus requires liquid cooling. Cold water is piped directly into the servers. And inside the servers sit the Nvidia chips, sleek, sophisticated black squares. The whole setup looks very expensive and it is. In a pre-AI cloud data center, a typical rack full of CPU servers might cost a few hundred thousand dollars. A single rack here packed with Nvidia H100 GPUs might cost a few million dollars. A single rack. XAI never said publicly what all this cost. But a JP Morgan report estimated that Colossus took between nine and eleven billion dollars. And up to seven billion of that was just on the AI hardware. It surprised me to learn this. An essential fact about these AI data centers. The GPUs really are the most expensive part. They can be more than half the total cost of the data center. More than the land, the power infrastructure, the cooling, it's really the chips. But in the immediate press all around Colossus, the thing people seemed to focus on was just how quickly this data center had been completed. The company says that they got it done in 122 days. Again, Anisa, the reporter from the information. A lot of people at the time instilled today debate just how quickly they did it and what was really up and running when they said the 122 days, but the impact of that data center on the entire industry was very palpable. People were making phone calls to their contractors. There was a group that flew a spy plane over the Colossus data center to see what was going on. A group that flew a spy plane? I'm sorry, what? Do you mean like one company or do you mean a bunch of CEOs got together and flew a spy plane? One one data center developer flew around the site and snapped pictures of what was going on because it was that important. They were like, this is going to be worth our time and worth the money. We need to see how Musk did this because people were seriously so shocked. For Elon's competition, his speed was shocking in an inspiring way, but in Memphis, that speed would soon read differently. Elon had made a crucial decision that had helped him get Colossus operational as fast as he did. And that decision became a flashpoint. Tinder for a huge fight that would swallow entire neighborhoods in Memphis. Underneath it all was a question. What happens when the city you live in becomes a battleground? In somebody else's AI race. That answer. And a look at the billions being poured into Colossus. Where that money is coming from and what it means for the rest of us. All of that in our next episode, which is available right now. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, Shruthy Pindamini, and PJ Vogue. Gert Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarreon. Fact checking this week by Mary Mathis, an additional production support from Kim Kubal. Special thanks this week to Chris Gilberti. Our executive producer is Leah Restanis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Brab Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mara Curran, Josephina Frances, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you would like to support our show, get ad free episodes, zero reruns, and some extras. Please consider signing up for Incognito mode. You can join at searchengine.show. Please follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.