Elon Musk said on social media to claim that xAI, his pet AI project, will have more 'computing power' than everyone else in the world combined in less than five years.
The billionaire said this in response to an X post that says xAI is the “best team to join if you want to innovate,” specifically mentioning efficiency (intelligence per watt/mass) and scale (total harnessed energy/matter).
The post Musk was responding to also shared the assessment of semiconductor industry research group SemiAnalysis, saying that xAI painting “Macrohard” on the roof of its Colossus 2 data center shows how serious it is in challenging Microsoft’s dominance.
However, we’re unsure whether Musk’s claim that xAI will have more computing power than everyone else combined will prove accurate. After all, even though he might have an enormous amount of resources behind him, other companies and institutions are also spending a lot of money to stay ahead of the competition. In relation, OpenAI has a large data center in Texas with a 300MW capacity — and it’s projected to reach gigawatt-scale by mid-2026. In addition, China is investing in its AI industry, with the government considering allocating $70 billion to domestic chip fabrication alone.
It’s conceivable for xAI to become the largest AI company in the world within the next five years. Still, it’s unlikely that it will be able to top the combined AI computing power of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Oracle, and other tech giants that are also spending billions of dollars on the industry. Experts say that even if Musk throws everything he has into xAI, including his own resources, labor force, and industrial might, he likely lacks the resources, labor force, and industrial capacity to beat all of the industry combined.
xAI has been pushing hard to expand its AI computing capabilities, with its first supercluster with 100,000 H200 Blackwell GPUs getting set up in just 19 days — a process which Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang says usually takes four years. It has also been growing rapidly, with Musk stating that xAI aims to target 50 million “H100-equivalent” AI GPUs in five years, with 230,000 GPUs already operational and training Grok. This could be a plausible target, especially as the billionaire is seemingly willing and able to burn through more than a billion dollars a month to see his project running. Musk's idea in AI technology would also excite new competition in the AI industry which would results more innovation in the market.