xAI expands Colossus 2 toward 2-gigawatt capacity

Elon Musk said xAI had purchased a third building near its Colossus 2 site in the Memphis area, nicknamed “Macrohardrr” and reportedly located across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, expanding the site’s planned power capacity toward nearly 2 gigawatts. Industry trackers put the resulting total at more than 555,000 Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs across the combined Colossus sites, with the overall buildout estimated at around $18 billion — figures drawn from third-party analysis rather than confirmed by xAI, whose own disclosures on the project have been limited to Musk’s social-media posts.

Colossus 2 had already come online earlier in 2025 with an initial deployment on the order of 550,000 GB200 and GB300 chips; the new building adds further capacity on top of that rather than representing the site’s first buildout. Reports said conversion of the building into usable data-centre space was due to begin in the first quarter of 2026, with GPU deployment following through the second and third quarters and an adjoining gas power plant intended to come online by the end of the year.

The expansion continued a pattern at the Memphis site of unusually fast, unconventional construction — earlier buildings there had reportedly been brought to operational status in weeks rather than the years typical for data centres — and came as Musk stated a goal of xAI eventually operating more AI compute than any competitor, with the company aiming toward roughly a million total GPUs across the site. It also sat within a broader debate through late 2025 over whether the pace of debt-financed AI infrastructure spending across the industry was sustainable.