Elon Musk wants enough AI power to toast a small country – who’s paying for this nuclear-sized dream?

Elon Musk plans AI compute equal to 50 million H100 GPUs within just five years
xAI’s training target equals 50 ExaFLOPS, but that doesn’t mean 50 million literal GPUs
Achieving 50 ExaFLOPS with H100s would demand energy equal to 35 nuclear power stations

Elon Musk has shared a bold new milestone for xAI, which is to deploy the equivalent of 50 million H100 class GPUs by 2030.

Framed as a measure of AI training performance, the claim refers to compute capacity, not literal unit count.

Still, even with ongoing advances in AI accelerator hardware, this goal implies extraordinary infrastructure commitments, especially in power and capital.

A massive leap in compute scale, with fewer GPUs than it sounds

In a post on X, Musk stated, “the xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent AI compute (but much better power efficiency) online within 5 years.”

Each Nvidia H100 AI GPU can deliver around 1,000 TFLOPS in FP16 or BF16, common formats for AI training – and reaching 50 ExaFLOPS using that baseline would theoretically require 50 million H100s.

Although newer architectures such as Blackwell and Rubin dramatically improve performance per chip.

According to performance projections, only about 650,000 GPUs using the future Feynman Ultra architecture may be required to hit the target.

The company has already begun scaling aggressively, and its current Colossus 1 cluster is powered by 200,000 Hopper based H100 and H200 GPUs, plus 30,000 Blackwell based GB200 chips.

A new cluster, Colossus 2, is scheduled to come online soon with over 1 million GPU units, combining 550,000 GB200 and GB300 nodes.

This puts xAI among the most rapid adopters of cutting edge AI writer and model training technologies.

The company probably chose the H100 over the newer H200 because the former remains a well understood reference point in the AI community, widely benchmarked and used in major deployments.

Its consistent FP16 and BF16 throughput makes it a clear unit of measure for longer term planning.

But perhaps the most pressing issue is energy. A 50 ExaFLOPS AI cluster powered by H100 GPUs would require 35GW, enough for 35 nuclear power plants.

Even using the most efficient projected GPUs, such as Feynman Ultra, a 50 ExaFLOPS cluster could require up to 4.685GW of power.

That is more than triple the power usage of xAI’s upcoming Colossus 2. Even with advances in efficiency, scaling energy supply remains a key uncertainty.

In addition, the cost will also be an issue. Based on current pricing, a single Nvidia H100 costs upwards of $25,000.

Using 650,000 next gen GPUs instead could still amount to tens of billions of dollars in hardware alone, not counting interconnect, cooling, facilities, and energy infrastructure.

Ultimately, Musk’s plan for xAI is technically plausible but financially and logistically daunting.

Via TomsHardware

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