Elon Musk selects Memphis for xAI's supercomputer site

Memphis, the home of the blues, is set to also become home to what officials are calling “the world’s largest supercomputer,” which will help power Musk’s xAI. Ted Townsend, president and CEO of Greater Memphis Chamber, described the deal to be the largest multibillion-dollar capital investment by a new-to-market company in Memphis’ history.

Despite the high dollar value of the agreement, it won’t bring a flood of new jobs to the area. The Memphis Business Journal says the number will total in the low- to mid-hundreds.

The xAI supercomputer, says Thompson, will be used “to fuel and fund the AI space for all of his [Musk’s] companies first, obviously with Tesla and SpaceX. If you can imagine the computational power necessary to place humans on the surface of Mars, that is going to happen here in Memphis.”

Tennessee is already home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer, which is located in the eastern part of the state. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Frontier is capable of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1 quintillion) calculations per second. It was supercomputers like this that helped scientists design drugs that fought COVID-19.

Whether Musk will hold the title of world’s largest for long is questionable. Aurora, which is being built outside of Chicago, will be able to perform 2 billion billion (technically, 2 quintillion) operations in a single second when it is fully operational. That’s expected to occur later this year.

Memphis is hoping to become a larger player in the technology space, and Musk’s selection of the city could give it a boost. Musk founded xAI last year and has claimed that investors have put as much as $6 billion into the company so far.