B (4:39)

Chapter One the Gold in the Ground. Ashburn sits on the very northern tip of Virginia, right by the Potomac. Driving around on the main roads here, everything looks so flat. It's more lawn than trees, lots of short fences behind which are these very square, very squat, windowless buildings.

C (5:03)

So you can see that, you know, we're on Loudoun County Parkway now. And more data centers here on the left.

B (5:11)

My guide today is Buddy Reiser, shaved head, dark suit. And this county that he's driving me through in Northern Virginia, Loudoun County. It has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Second place is a sleepy little town named Beijing.

C (5:27)

Everything you're seeing is data center. Data center here, data center there, data center there. This is Data Center Abbey proper.

B (5:35)

Honestly, I've read a lot about this before getting here, but the scale of just the construction is mind bending, like everything is being built right now. And that's on top of a whole lot that already existed.

C (5:50)

That's correct. I mean, often when I take people on tours, they think, wow, I've heard a lot about it, but this exceeds my expectation. And what you have to remember is that this is one of five clusters here, right? There's the Sterling cluster, there's the Leesburg cluster, there's the.

B (6:09)

Everywhere you look, there's either data centers or data centers under construction. Cranes abound. This building frenzy. It has certainly gotten an adrenaline shot from AI. Some of the new unfinished buildings we were seeing were AI inference centers. But Buddy told me that construction here has been going nonstop for many years. That really, it began back when we were all first starting to store our data in the cloud. Back then, this was the late 2000s. Google had announced Google Docs, you didn't have to save documents on your hard drive anymore. Amazon had announced Amazon Web Services, meaning startups could borrow Amazon servers. They didn't have to own their own anymore. And the invention of the cloud would be a huge deal. It would change almost everything about the way we use the Internet. There was money to be made here, and Loudon needed that money. The county was reeling from two successive crises, the dot com crash and then the mortgage crisis. And in the wake of those disasters, Buddy showed up.

C (7:16)

I arrived here in 2007 in, you have to remember, we were pretty desperate then, right? We were laying people off, we were raising taxes.

B (7:27)

And was it that you were losing property taxes because people were leaving because of what, like their companies had collapsed?

C (7:36)

No, it was, you know, that all that whole fake mortgage bubble. 81% of our tax revenue was coming from homes, residences. So when the housing bubble burst, you know, all of a sudden we lost about a third of our tax base. So that was how I came here. I was our first real proactive salesperson.

B (7:58)

There was a reason I'd come here to meet Buddy and have him tell me this story, the thing that he was doing back then, which is selling companies on Loudon, inviting big business to town. This happens everywhere. Every town in America needs money. Tax revenue to fund schools, roads, fire stations. And so they invite companies to come set up. They try to negotiate good terms, how good a job they do at that. What kinds of corporations arrive that can really define how life feels in a place afterwards. The story of how things played out in Loudoun would end up contrasting with the story of another city I'd visit later on, where these same buildings, data centers, would come to represent something very different. But for now, Loudon Buddy and his quest quickly learned a couple helpful facts about Loudon. AOL used to be headquartered here. And during the telecom bubble of the late 90s, a lot of fiber Optic cable had been laid in the ground. These are the long glass tubes that carry Internet traffic using infrared light. And after the bubble burst, much of Louden's fiber just sat there unused. And so what was here underground was the data equivalent of miles and miles of pristine, mostly empty highway.

C (9:17)

This area right here, this intersection of Loudoun County Parkway and Wax Pool is basically main and main for the Internet. There's more fiber in the ground here than anywhere in the world.

B (9:30)

Wow. Right here.

C (9:31)

Right here, this intersection. When you think about fiber, it's about capacity and it's about latency. It's about being close to that, that center hub. So this land around here is some of the most expensive land you'll find.

B (9:48)

And it's because the proximity means speed.

C (9:50)

Proximity means speed.

B (9:53)

I do want to point out there's a bunch of ducks on this intersection. Data center alley.

C (9:58)

Yeah, it's this here.

B (9:59)

Are those ducks or geese?

C (10:00)

Geese here on the left. Here's another speed.

B (10:05)

Loudon was trying to recover from the popping of past bubbles. But those bubbles had left behind infrastructure that was actually very valuable, ready to be taken advantage of the high speed fiber in the ground, but also these big empty buildings that had been built before the dot com bubble burst. And so Buddy presented his idea to the board. Let's find some rich tech companies to fill the buildings, and that is where we will get our tax base.

C (10:33)

I remember sweating through my suit thinking, you know, how am I trying to sell this? And one of the board members looked at me and said, Mr. Reiser, I don't understand why we need data centers if everything's going to the cloud. And I'm just like, dumbfounded because, well, obviously the cloud is in the data centers. It's not right. Really in the clouds. Right?

B (10:54)

Right. It's funny to Buddy, this is just an amusing anecdote, but I found myself thinking about it a lot here in Virginia. What we call a new technology really shapes how we understand it. The name the cloud picked, probably to make us feel safe, to make us feel like we're not putting our data and trust in other people's computers. The name also has this side effect of making you forget that the Internet isn't a thing that's invisible in the sky. It's very physical. It's made of cables and servers that all have to be put somewhere. Buddy explained this to the board member, and then he hit the road, pitching big tech companies on loudon.

C (11:38)

We've never given $1 of local incentive money to data centers to bring them here. Not $1. What we did, part of our pitch was we understand data centers. We know how to get them to market. We're going to make it fast. We're going to make it predictable. And that was the pitch. That's what I was out on the road selling to Amazon and Microsoft and Google and all the rest of them.

B (12:06)

The pitch worked. Every tech company under the sun would arrive. The big ones, the new ones. New many you've never heard of. And as the cloud grew invisible to most of us, people in Loudoun could see all these concrete boxes blooming across.

C (12:21)

The landscape when the cloud started to take off. You know, I really say about 2017 is when that really took off. Then we had a real big growth spurt there. Then, you know, when Covid hit and everybody started working from home and we were, you know, stuck watching TV and we were streaming videos and we were communicating and learning and working and everything through the Internet, all of a sudden there was another growth spurt.

B (12:50)

I had no idea. Yeah, you were seeing the Internet from a completely different angle than the rest of us.

C (12:55)

Yeah. And we were seeing that demand. And there's not been a single day without data center construction in Loudoun for going on two decades now.

B (13:04)

That's pretty crazy.

C (13:05)

You know, Fast forward from 2007 to 2025, we've been able to lower our tax rate by 48 cents on the dollar. We had 10 straight years where we were building elementary schools, middle schools, and one high school. Ten straight years we were doing that. And that money comes from the data centers. You know, we'll get a billion dollars in local tax revenue from the data centers this year.

B (13:31)

I do need to fact check, buddy here. The county made all almost a billion dollars from data centers this year. 895 million, to be exact. That enormous amount of money is perhaps why even though you do find people in Loudoun complaining about the data centers, nobody wants a new transmission line going through their backyard. The general sentiment seems tolerant. Chapter two Inside the cloud.

D (13:59)

No pictures. You can describe what you see, but you will never, ever say the name of what you see.

B (14:07)

Michael Whitlock, general manager of the Sabi Data center in Ashburn. He's actually much friendlier than he sounds over here.

D (14:14)

That area still, it's off limits no matter what you want.

B (14:16)

That's not an issue.

D (14:18)

No, no issues.

B (14:19)

The main thing that Michael is trying to keep secret is the names of the companies that are renting server space here. I asked why those names were so secret. It was indicated to me via hand gesture that that is also a secret. Oh, it's secret. Okay, that's fine. But Michael was otherwise happy to show us how this cloud data center functions.

D (14:37)

And what I'm going to show you today.

B (14:39)

The giant block of a building is organized in layers, kind of like an onion.

D (14:43)

So we're here on our loading dock adjacent to our generator yard.

B (14:47)

The outer layer outside the building is all the power infrastructure. So there's this power substation pulling electricity from the grid.

D (14:55)

If you look over top of those colas, you'll see a giant substation. This is the wax pool substation.

B (15:00)

Virginia's data centers use a ton of electricity. Nearly 40% of the state's estimated power use this year will be just for data centers. However, most of the air pollution being created by that power generation, that pollution is not actually happening in this county. It's happening elsewhere in other parts of Virginia or other states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, because that's where the grid is pulling power from.

D (15:26)

Sunny outside, very sunny.

B (15:27)

So here today, the skies are blue, the air is clear, and the people of Loudoun county are not dealing with the side effects of their power needs. Inside the building, Michael shows us the next layer of the onion, the cooling layer.

D (15:45)

So we have now gone into what we call the Cray Gallery. It's computer room air handler.

B (15:51)

These are the a long room filled with industrial air conditioning fans, each one about my height, with a maze of metal tubes snaking cold water in and hot water out. And are there usually people working in here or is it usually this empty?

D (16:05)

It's empty until we have maintenance going on in here.

B (16:12)

Have you seen the TV show Severance?

D (16:15)

I have not.

B (16:17)

We look like we're walking through the sets of Severance. It's just like these endless halls with fluorescent lighting, and every door looks like the other door. And I imagine it's easy to get lost.

D (16:28)

This is our longest hallway in the facility. I'd say this is a quarter mile. This is a nice long.

B (16:36)

I thought about what it would be like for some future archaeologists finding the remains of this building long after we're gone, after the Internet's been shut off. What would they think this is for? I realize the place reminds me a little of photos I've seen of the insides of pyramids. A labyrinthine, enormous tomb. Do a lot more people want to see data centers these days?

D (16:59)

It's always been a hot spot, but, yeah, just makes it that much more like, hey, what's going on?

B (17:05)

Oh, what is going on? This is very loud.

D (17:07)

You're in what we call Our mpoe. It's our main point of entry. This is where the fiber.

B (17:12)

This is the next layer, where all the fiber enters the facility. And finally we get to the most important layer of all. So we're entering a data hall, the heart of the building, the place where the computers actually live.

D (17:26)

Let me give you up and close personal on a place that everybody doesn't get to see. So you're special. I'm going to give you a 30 second.

B (17:37)

I get 30 seconds to stand here amidst the tall white stacks. Walking behind one of those stacks, I see an actual server rack, a metal framed rectangle, the kind you'd glimpse in the IT closet of your office, holding the stack of servers, an unremarkable hunk of metal. But this is where the cloud lives. It's funny, I spend most of my work days living inside of a Google document. But before this story, I'd never thought about the backend that enabled that. Like every time at the office, I type a single letter, say an X into a dock. That X gets transmitted over my wi fi to the router, where it jumps to my Internet service provider's fiber, onto a fiber optic highway, and ultimately to a data center like this one, to a room like this one, to a server like the one I'm looking at. The data center is infrastructure. And like most infrastructure, or water lines or sewage pipes, it's both an engineering miracle, but also so reliable as to render itself boring. It works so we don't notice it. For years, that's what data centers were. Boring miracles that nobody except of course, Buddy Reiser ever really thought much about. And then in late 2022, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity quietly released a chatbot that would upend our understanding of the Internet ChatGPT. And almost overnight, a data center would take on a different meaning. Instead of being boring old pieces of Internet infrastructure, now data centers are being used to train AI, which makes them territory in a war. An enormous, expensive, ego driven war waged by tech billionaires. After the break, Prometheus Stargate Colossus.

A (20:06)

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombus. This time of year, it is sensory overload everywhere. But one feeling we're all still chasing is cozy. And Bombas has the socks, slippers, tees, basically everything you need to get there. Honestly, there's something therapeutic about putting on a fresh pair of socks. And Bombas has figured out how to bottle that feeling. Their slippers have sink in, cushioning their tees have the perfect weight to them, and that comfort keeps going after the first wear. And when it comes to gifting, Bombas has answers for everyone on your list. Running socks for the marathoner. Baby socks that actually stay on tiny feet. They've got something for everybody, and this season they're really stepping up their slipper and slide game with new styles and materials. What I really like about their mission is that every time you purchase, Bombus donates one pair to someone facing homelessness. So when you're cozy, someone else gets to be too. Head over to bombus.com engine and use code ENGINE for 20% off your first purchase. That's b o m B-A-S.com enjin. Code ENGINE at checkout this episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rocket Money. You might think you have a solid handle on your budget, but if your bank account isn't reflecting that, something's off. That's where Rocket Money comes in. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. It shows you all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you forgot about. If you see a subscription you no longer want, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. You can even automatically create custom budgets based on your past spending. Rocket Money helped me spot a couple of subscriptions that I had completely forgotten about, and I even used it to negotiate lower bills for myself, which was pretty fantastic. Rocket Money has saved users over $2.5 billion, including over $880 million in canceled subscriptions alone. This their 10 million members save up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com search today. That's RocketMoney.com search.

E (22:18)

Are my AirPods giving me cancer? What is cancer? Why are we having fewer babies? What do I do if I see a bear? And does size really matter in government? Welcome to Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm your host, Naima Reza, and in this new show I ask simple questions to big thinkers. Like I asked Neil Degrasse Tyson whether it's a problem to believe in horoscopes.

C (22:38)

Only if you wanted to become head.

B (22:40)

Of NASA, but otherwise there are plenty of jobs for you in the world.

E (22:43)

Or I asked Mark Cuban if billionaires can save us, what it's like to be so rich, and why everyone has an opinion on everything These days, everybody's.

B (22:51)

So sure, Mark, so sure.

E (22:53)

Yeah, I'm surrounded by sure people. And I feel like, am I A? Because, like, I'm not sure what the answer is.

B (22:58)

A lot of times that I'm a.

E (23:02)

I should change the name of the show, right? Smart girl, Dumb questions. It's a curiosity party. And you know you're curious. Tune in on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

B (23:29)

Chapter three Arms Race so when you first got assigned the cloud computing beat, what did you think?

F (23:37)

I thought that I did not know how I was going to make cloud computing interesting to the reader or to myself. And so it was sort of a let me do this niche boring thing for a little bit before I switch beats. And now I'm like, this is going to be my beat for a long time.

B (23:56)

Anissa Gardizzi is a reporter at the Information. She'd been assigned the cloud beat in early 2023. Lucky for her, this was the exact moment when this formerly sleepy part of the tech world was beginning to explode.

F (24:09)

OpenAI had just a couple months earlier released ChatGPT, and everyone was going crazy. How did they do that? This is such a breakthrough. We have to catch up.

A (24:20)

Tonight we're taking a deep dive into the world of AI with a special focus on ChatGPT.

F (24:26)

ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pre Trained Transformer, and it's fully powered through artificial intelligence.

G (24:33)

Just rolls off the tongue.

B (24:35)

Uh huh.

F (24:35)

Joining us now to talk about.

B (24:37)

For most consumers, honestly, even for Most tech reporters, ChatGPT came as a total surprise. But like most overnight successes, it had been building for years. Back in 2012, a small group of academics had trained a model that was unusually good at classifying images. It could distinguish, for instance, between different breeds of dogs. The academics trained this primitive neural network using more than a million images. But their big innovation was that they'd handled the computing load with a particular kind of chip, a graphic processing unit, a gpu. A gpu? Specifically from a company called Nvidia, which most people at the time associated with video games, the academics built their little neural network using just two of these Nvidia chips. They won a contest and they published a paper announcing that this was possible. OpenAI spent the years between that paper and ChatGPT's release applying that insight that you could build more powerful neural networks by feeding them more training data and wiring together more and more GPUs to process it all. In 2012, the academics had used two Nvidia chips. By 2020, OpenAI had partnered with Microsoft to connect 10,000 Nvidia chips. Just a couple years later, they were reportedly up to 20,000 chips, which is how they were able to train ChatGPT 3.5, the chatbot that would take the Internet by storm.

F (26:06)

Once AI started taking off, it became clear that to train these massive models that companies like OpenAI needed to train, they needed an enormous amount of GPUs, all in the same space.

B (26:20)

The data center setup that Microsoft had built for OpenAI, it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and packed with GPUs. And that was now the exact kind of setup that everybody else wanted. And what would have happened in the earlier cloud era is that the biggest cloud providers, like Google and Amazon, would have just built those kinds of data centers and rented compute to everybody else. But now, in the AI era, these companies seemed more preoccupied with competing with each other.

F (26:49)

OpenAI developed ChatGPT on Microsoft's cloud. And so you had Amazon and Google looking around the room and figuring out how they could catch up with ChatGPT. And so the issue that they were facing was that they were buying so many Nvidia GPUs, but they had to decide, how many are we going to rent out to our customers and how many are we going to keep for our internal AI teams? Because Microsoft just one upped us with ChatGPT.

B (27:17)

I see. So it's like they realize that's a way to almost kneecap their competitors. Like, if you're Google, you might be thinking, I have GPUs, but if I save more of those GPUs for myself, for my own developers, then in a way that is like a competitive advantage.

F (27:35)

Exactly. They were very much. You know, some people would use the word hoarding, but they were. They were definitely keeping large amounts of the Nvidia GPUs for their AI research teams.

B (27:47)

Again, ChatGPT was a huge surprise to us normal people. But what you can't lose sight of is what it meant to companies like Google and meta giants that typically dominate the Internet, but who this time had been caught half asleep overnight. The big tech companies wanted their own powerful chatbots, and they were hungry now for GPUs to try to quickly train those chatbots up. This is where our current data center construction boom begins.

A (28:15)

Amazon plans to spend $10 billion to build data centers.

E (28:19)

$165 billion data center.

B (28:23)

NATO will invest hundreds of billions of.

A (28:25)

Dollars into computers to invest an initial $100 billion. But it could be up to half a trillion over the next four years.

B (28:34)

These new AI data centers would be gone, gargantuan, much bigger than any built in Loudon in the cloud era. And they would have grand names pulled out of myth and science fiction, the kind of names you'd expect to see slapped on the side of a Star Destroyer. This is the site of Project Stargate.

E (28:51)

Now the project is called Project Jupiter.

B (28:54)

Project Zodiac, Prometheus coming online, he says in 2026. There's also Hyperion that he says will scale to 4,5 gigawatts over several years. It's hard to put that in context. These data center projects together will cost trillions of dollars, all spent really on the same gamble. The tech moguls have tied the future of their companies, as well as an oversized portion of the American economy, to the notion that all of this in the end will make sense. And while I do not have access yet to information about the future, I started to take a closer look at these enormous data center projects, trying to figure out for myself, does it make sense? Could it make sense? I ended up focusing on one the biggest and ballsiest of all data center projects. The first of its kind from a total upstart in AI, a tech CEO who has never met a race he did not want to win.

E (29:59)

Elon Musk is starting a new company to get into the field of artificial intelligence. Musk announced the launch of X AI today, he says.

B (30:08)

Chapter 4 Elon enters the ring in the summer of 2023, eight long months after the big ChatGPT release. Elon unveils his AI startup.

A (30:21)

According to its website, the new company will work with Twitter, Tesla and other companies to understand the true nature of the universe.

B (30:27)

If the AI race is defined by founders making incredibly hyperbolic claims about what their chatbots are going to do to society, Elon, of course, out hyperbolate them all.

G (30:38)

So the mission of XAI and Grok is to understand the universe. We want to understand the nature of the universe so we can figure out what's going on. Where is the aliens? What's the meaning of life? How does the universe end? How did it start? All these fundamental questions were driven by curiosity.

B (30:54)

To most of the people who'd been following the AI race, Elon Musk did not seem like the entrant to bet on. It wasn't just the overly lofty promises. It was that unlike the competitors, Elon was a have not. He did not have his own data centers. He did not have a big head start. Here's Anissa.

F (31:13)

One of the biggest questions I had was how could they possibly catch up to OpenAI. And I think a lot of people were sort of questioning, like, okay, how is this startup that doesn't have a lot of money going to get enough GPUs to train AI that's even competitive? And if they don't have a large data center and they don't push out their training runs as quickly as possible, OpenAI is going to get even more steps ahead of them. And so Musk had to prove that even though they were late to the game, that they could catch up and be competitive.

B (31:48)

I should say here we emailed XAI for comment on the story and we received their standard auto response, quote, legacy media lies. They were not going to talk to us. However, Elon Musk has talked publicly about XAI a fair amount of. For instance, the day he announced his startup, he seemed to echo what Anissa just said, that he was beginning this race from far behind.

G (32:12)

XAI is really just kind of starting out here, so it's not a, you know, it'll be a while before it's relevant. On a scale of the sort of OpenAI, Microsoft AI or the Google DeepMind AI, those are really the two big gorillas.

B (32:33)

For Elon to catch up to the big gorillas, he had to very quickly train up his young chatbot, Grok. Elon believed that the more GPUs grok was trained on, the more intelligent it would be. So he wanted 100,000 GPUs just to start. On another live broadcast, Elon talked about what happened next. How he went around to companies like Oracle to ask how quickly they could give him the setup that he wanted.

G (32:57)

We actually weren't intending to do a data center ourselves. We were going to just. We went to the data center providers and said, how long would it take to have 100,000 GPUs operating coherently in a single location? And we got timeframes from 18 to 24 months. So we're like, well, 18 to 24 months, that means losing as a certainty. So the only option was to do it ourselves.

B (33:22)

The only option was to do it themselves. It was a moonshot. Elon obviously had never built a data center himself. And because he wanted to build something faster than anyone thought was possible, he decided to try something new. He would find an existing building, an abandoned factory with immediate access to a lot of electricity, and then he would engineer a way to cram that structure full of Nvidia chips. For that plan to work, the factory would need to be in a place willing to cooperate and cooperate fast.

A (34:01)

Hey, Julia, I'M about to call you.

B (34:02)

How's it going?

A (34:03)

I'm good.

C (34:03)

How you doing? Good.

B (34:05)

Nice to meet you in person.

G (34:07)

Hello.

D (34:07)

Hello.

B (34:08)

Recently, producer Garrett Graham and I flew down to one such city, Memphis, Tennessee, where we visited a white city, spacious office. Through a big window, I could see the river.

F (34:20)

Yeah, that's.

A (34:20)

That is the Mississippi. It's funny, we've been in Memphis for.

C (34:23)

48 hours and hadn't seen the Mississippi yet.

B (34:25)

I've been trying. We were about to meet the person in charge here. So let me start by just having you introduce yourself. So tell me your name and what you do.

H (34:34)

Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber.

B (34:39)

Ted. A very stylish man, dapper suit, prayer beads on his wrist. Ted is to Memphis a version of what Buddy Reiser is to Loudoun County. His job is to convince companies to set up shop here. And in particular, there was an empty factory by the Mississippi river that he and his team had been trying to fill.

H (34:57)

We'd been marketing this site in Memphis that was home to Electrolux, a very.

B (35:04)

Large factory previously used for producing kitchen ovens.

H (35:08)

800,000 square foot facility that they had decommissioned and moved out of great space. It was probably one of the hottest buildings in the Southeast market. We were showing it to a lot of companies, a lot of major brands.

B (35:24)

And give me a sense, just for a little bit of context, because again, it's my first time in Memphis. How much did this city need? Economic development?

H (35:32)

Oh, it's in desperate need of that. You know, when you consider going back to the 2008 recession, you know, it took Memphis 10 years to recover from that recession and that was four years longer than the national average. And we've had generational poverty in some neighborhoods in our community and we want to solve for that.

B (35:56)

Memphis did have some old school industry. There's a steel plant in town, an Oil Refinery. FedEx is headquartered here. But Ted is particularly interested in tech. The part of the American economy that year after year still seems vibrant. He was interested in tech, but tech companies had not been as interested in Memphis Until March of 2024, when Ted learned that a mysterious tech company was asking after the old oven factory. As his meeting invitation started getting accepted, he could see the email domains and@ Neuralink SpaceX.com Ted says this first encounter with reps from across Elon's hydra headed tech empire, it was exhilarating. And within days he got word that Elon himself wanted to meet.

H (36:45)

It was incredibly thrilling. You know, you open up your, in my case, my iPad and the boxes start to populate, you know, in the virtual meeting. And there in the top left corner of my screen is Elon Musk. And it was a, a seminal moment. It was a pass or fail, right? Someone like Mr. Musk moves quickly, he discerns information rapidly. And he was focused on making a decision very quickly. So I was told by his team to do your thing, Ted, sell Memphis, and then hand it over to the utility partners to talk about power. And so I began and Elon quickly cut me off and said, I don't need to be sold on Memphis. I want to talk about power.

B (37:29)

And.

H (37:30)

And I thought I messed up, but handed it over very quickly to my great partners and we ended it. I was still a little uneasy about how abruptly I didn't get a chance to sell Memphis, but I got over that when it was Sunday night. We got the call that he had given the green light to his team to go with Memphis. So in a week's time, we had won that project.

B (37:56)

You know him for x, Tesla and SpaceX. But now Elon Musk is coming to Memphis to build the world's largest supercomputer.

C (38:03)

An unlikely story if there ever was one.

B (38:06)

This is a Chapter 5 play to win or Don't Play at all. Elon Musk would name his data center Colossus, reportedly after a science fiction novel from the 60s in which scientists build a supercomputer named Colossus, which later enslaved humanity. The Memphians were just going to call it a supercomputer. Whatever it was, whatever it was going to be, a science fiction future had arrived in the Mississippi Delta.

C (38:32)

Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber, says this is single handedly the largest multi billion dollar capital investment by a new market company in Memphis history.

B (38:45)

Ted held a triumphant press conference.

H (38:48)

This monumental recruitment investment marks a pivotal point in our city's trajectory and will drive continued entrepreneurship and ingenuity, propelling Memphis to the forefront of global innovation and competitiveness. So, Memphis, are you ready? Let's go.

B (39:16)

Thank you all. Colossus could bring tens of millions in much needed tax revenue for Memphis. But for all of this to work, Memphis had to move fast. Not city government fast, not even tech company fast. They had to move at Elon Musk's definition of fast. The city and county would grant permits at record speed, put agreements in place for power and water. Elon's people would gut the inside of the oven factory and bring in racks to house the Nvidia GPUs. Even before Ted had publicly announced the project. He remembers touring the construction site with Elon and being astounded at the rate of progress.

H (39:54)

Everyone was just amazed at what was built. You know, Elon did have his phone out and he was taking videos. And I was texting my team back here at the chamber. I was like, has he posted? Has he posted? So he did not. But I was invited into a room where it was after the tour. And everybody sits, and Elon is standing at the front and he's pacing just a little bit, and there's a hush that falls over the room. And he says, we're going to haul ass in Memphis. And he thrust his fist into the air and he says, lfg. And he said it just like that. He didn't, you know, he used the letters. It gave me chills. As a Memphian, I was witnessing history. And then from that one visit, he decided that very day, we're going to double it. We're going to use the rest of this building to double it in size. So you're talking 200,000 Nvidia chips.

A (40:53)

I got to visit Memphis.

G (40:55)

Yeah.

B (40:55)

Yeah.

A (40:56)

You're going big on compute.

G (40:57)

Yeah.

A (40:57)

You've also said play to win or don't play at all.

B (41:00)

So.

H (41:00)

Yeah.

A (41:01)

What does it take to win?

G (41:03)

For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute.

B (41:09)

Elon appeared on the Lex Friedman podcast that summer in 2024. He talks about the Colossus build. He describes being on the ground there and how he actually did some of the cabling himself.

G (41:20)

I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing. I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a pulty connection. That tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling. So many cables.

B (41:37)

This one episode is eight and a half hours long, which leaves the two of them plenty of time to nerd out on the complexity of Colossus's cabling.

G (41:47)

That is a crazy cable layout.

A (41:50)

It looks pretty cool.

G (41:51)

Yeah.

A (41:52)

It's like the human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see. It is a brain.

G (41:59)

I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is the cables.

A (42:04)

Yeah.

B (42:06)

There's something about just listening in on Elon taking a break from his data center sprint to sit for one of Lex Friedman's interviews. The two expressing wonder in matching monotones. It's easy to make fun of them, and I might be just a little bit. But the truth is, the thing that they are Describing is remarkable. I looked at a photo posted on the XAI account showing the Colossus interior, this meticulous Byzantine setup. And while I did not see a human brain, I do see something new and impressive. Rows of tightly packed dense yellow cables which line the ceiling. It's a much more complex interior than the data center I saw in Loudoun, with a much more elaborate cooling system. GPUs run very hot and so instead Colossus requires liquid cooling. Cold water is piped directly into the servers and inside those servers sit the Nvidia chips. Sleek, sophisticated black squares. The whole setup looks very expensive. And it is. In a pre AI cloud data center, a typical rack full of CPU servers might cost a few hundred thousand dollars. A single rack here packed with Nvidia H100 GPUs might cost a few million dollars. A single rack. XAI never said publicly what all this cost, but a JP Morgan report estimated that Colossus took between 9 and 11 billion dollars. And up to 7 billion of that was just on the AI hardware. It surprised me to learn this, an essential fact about these AI data centers. The GPUs really are the most expensive part. They can be more than half the total cost of the data center. More than the land, the power infrastructure, the cooling. It's really the chips. But in the immediate press all around Colossus, the thing people seemed to focus on was just how quickly this data center had been completed.

F (44:03)

The company says that they got it done in 122 days.

B (44:08)

Again, Anissa, the reporter from the Information.

F (44:10)

A lot of people at the time and still today debate just how quickly they did it and what was really up and running when they said the 122 days. But the impact of that data center on the entire industry was very palpable. People were making phone calls to their contractors. There was a group that flew a spy plane over the Colossus data center to see what was going on.

B (44:33)

A group that flew. Flew a spy plane. I'm sorry, what? Like, do you mean like one company or do you mean a bunch of CEOs got together and flew a spy plane?

F (44:42)

1. One data center developer flew around the site and snapped pictures of what was going on because it was that important. They were like, this is going to be worth our time and worth the money. We need to see how Musk did this. Because people were seriously so shocked.

B (45:00)

For Elon's competition. His speed was shocking in an inspiring way. But in Memphis, that speed would soon read differently. Elon had made a crucial decision that had helped him get Colossus operational as fast as he did. And that decision became a flashpoint tinder for a huge fight that would swallow entire neighborhoods in Memphis. Elon Musk we do not want Peer in nothing. We can't say it any plainer.

F (45:32)

We do not want him in nothing.

B (45:39)

Underneath it all was a question. What happens when the city you live in becomes a battleground in somebody else's AI race? That answer and a look at the billions behind being poured into Colossus, where that money is coming from and what it means for the rest of us. All of that in our next episode, which is available right now.

A (46:15)

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B (49:35)

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, Shruti Pinamaneni and PJ Vogt. Garrett Graham is our Senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our Associate producer. Theme Original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian, fact checking this week by Mary Mathis and additional production support from Kim Kubel. Our Executive producer is Leah Rhys Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney and Hilary Shaf. If you would like to support our show, get ad free episodes, zero reruns and some extras. Please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join join at SearchEngine show. Please follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.