Elon Musk's xAI to build supercomputer larger than Meta for Grok chatbot

Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X, has informed investors that his startup xAI is planning to build a supercomputer by end of 2025, Engadget reported citing a report by The Information.

The supercomputer, which is at least four times larger than anything used today by competitors like Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, would power a future, smarter iteration of its Grok chatbot.

Musk, 52, has reportedly referred to the supercomputer as a "gigafactory of compute," Engadget reported, adding that it would rely on tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPU) and cost billions of dollars to build.

Previously, the tech billionaire said the third version of Grok will require at least 100,000 of the chips — a fivefold increase over the 20,000 GPUs said to be in use for training Grok 2.0.

Musk's Grok chatbot is currently in version 1.5, which was released in April, and is now capable enough to process visual information like photographs and diagrams as well as text.

Furthermore, earlier this month, X started rolling out AI-generated news summaries powered by Grok for premium users.