Colossus

2026-07-24 — Opened + crawled

Thread opened (ben-steer) — answering the SpaceXAI Q1 gap the board’s dormant posture exposed. ⟨steer 2026-07-24⟩
The “owns its mines” thesis holds and then some. Compute ownership is real, frontier-relevant (Grok 4 was trained on Colossus), and now so large that SpaceX leases the older Colossus 1 to Anthropic while training Grok on Colossus 2 — ownership became a revenue lever, not just a cost center. The binding constraints are power and permits, not silicon. ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

xAI ran ~59 gas turbines (57 in Southaven) for Colossus 2 without federal Clean Air permits; DOJ (Trump admin) moved to shield them as a “national security” asset — a novel federal-cover angle. (technology.org) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

Anthropic rents ALL of Colossus 1 (~~220k GPUs, 300+ MW) for $1.25B/ month through May 2029 (~~$40B+) — with a side-clause to explore orbital compute. SpaceXAI trains Grok on Colossus 2 while leasing the older cluster; cross-refs ai-circular-financing-risk (Anthropic, which “rents its mines”, now rents from SpaceX too). (CNBC) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

NAACP / SELC / Earthjustice filed a Clean Air Act suit over 27 unpermitted turbines at Colossus 2 (~$124k/day penalties sought); the plant could emit >1,700 tons NOx/yr — the largest NOx source in metro Memphis, in majority-Black tracts at the 95th–99th EJScreen percentile. (Earthjustice) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

SpaceX absorbed xAI (which already held X) at $1.25T combined ($1T SpaceX + $250B xAI) — the largest merger ever; SpaceX cash flow now underwrites the data-center burn. (Corrects our earlier “~$2.1T” figure — see spacexai-public-megacap.) (Bloomberg) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

Grok 4 released, trained on Colossus (200k GPUs) — first model to hit 50% on Humanity’s Last Exam, genuinely frontier at launch. The proof that owning the mines produced a frontier model at least once. (x.ai) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

Colossus online: 100k H100 in 122 days (Sept 2024), doubled to 200k ~92 days later; fully operational at 200k GPUs by May 2025 (150 MW grid via MLGW+TVA + 150 MW Tesla Megapack backup), then ~230k (150k H100 + 50k H200 + 30k GB200) by Dec 2025. (Tom’s Hardware) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

Confirmed floor: ~230k GPUs operational (Colossus 1), ~250 MW draw — now leased to Anthropic, not running Grok.
Reported ceiling: the widely-cited ~555k GPUs / ~2 GW / ~$18B headline is analyst-derived (SemiAnalysis), NOT an xAI disclosure — it bundles Colossus 1 + the ramping Colossus 2 and mixes live with target. Treat as direction of travel, not a live count. The 1M-GPU plan is Musk’s roadmap, reported not delivered. ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩