DEPLOY

Data center campus

xAI Colossus (Memphis)

xAI Colossus is an AI data center campus developed by xAI in Tennessee, Memphis. 2 GW of capacity has been announced; 1 GW is energized. The gap is what this page tracks: what is claimed versus what is actually built, each figure dated and sourced.

Partially energized · xAI · Former industrial site · Memphis, Tennessee, United States

Track xAI Colossus (Memphis)

Capacity: announced vs energized

Contracted
not recorded
Under construction
not recorded

Announced-to-energized gap: 1 GW. Every figure below is a single dated, sourced claim. Current best per series resolves by evidence tier, then date. See the methodology.

15th-largest announced of 97 tracked campuses1st by energized capacity60th percentile announced-to-energized gap≈ 1,620,000 homes of power at full announced capacity (basis)

Promised online: Q4 2025. Energized capacity is now on record. Claimed by Elon Musk / xAI (source).

xAI Colossus (Memphis) capacity claims
Source
Announced2 GW2026-01-15claimedpress release
Energized1 GW2026-06-30reportedjournalist report

Construction evidence

Dated satellite imagery of the site itself, oldest to newest, with the campus milestones that landed in each window. This is what the site looked like from orbit while announcements, permits, and energizations were dated into our ledger, so bare land, grading, and building mass tell their own story alongside the paper trail. Sentinel-2 true color, 10 m resolution, cloud-free scenes; click any frame to expand it.

Delivery paceAnnounced Q1 2026 · live Q2 2026 · 6 mo build

2018-05-11Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2018
2020-05-10Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2020
2022-06-14Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2022
2024-06-13Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024
2025-09-16Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025

Dated Sentinel-2 imagery, gated to hand-verified site coordinates. Milestones synthesized from the campus's own capacity ledger, financial claims, and lifecycle events; each chip links to its source. How we source and verify it: satellite construction evidence.

Per-building manifest tied to the site polygons and imagery. When we know a building's outline we render it; when we know only its year and capacity we still surface those as first-class rows so the campus total is auditable, not a headline claim. Sorted largest-first; 4 on record.

xAI Colossus
Building sqft: 778,751
polygon on record (19 vertices)
Building 12
Building sqft: 520,410
polygon on record (82 vertices)
Building 4
Building sqft: 62,691
polygon on record (5 vertices)
Building 9
Building sqft: 60,771
polygon on record (17 vertices)

Manifest totals: 1,422,623 sqft. Rolled from the per-building rows above.

Key facts

partially energized

Lifecycle

2 GW

Announced

1 GW

Energized

xAI

Developer

United States

Location

former industrial site

Land

1

Facilities tracked

Reported facts

Structured facts sourced from citations already on this record. Each fact traces to a source in the References section below.

Operator
xAI
Primary workload
Grok foundation-model training and inference
GPU count (reported)
~200,000 Nvidia GPUs on-site (Hopper / Blackwell mix)
Announced capacity
2 GW target (combined Memphis-area complex)
Cooling
Treated wastewater, roughly 3 million gallons/day from the purpose-built Colossus Water Recycling Plant
On-site power
Methane gas turbines (Solaris fleet, ~1.1 GW under construction)
Reported buildout cost
~$18B (Introl / SemiAnalysis)
First-cluster energization
September 2024 (100k GPUs live in 122 days)
Chip supplier
Nvidia
GPU mix (Musk-stated Sep 2026)
Musk-stated (company-stated): Colossus 1 = 150k NVIDIA H100 + 50k H200 + 30k GB200 (230k GPUs on this accounting). Cap: founder X; supersedes coarser prior ~200k mix reporting for this snapshot
GPUs 220k+ (Mid-South company-stated Sep 2026)
Company-stated (company-stated; browser-confirmed Sep 25 2026): Colossus I page figure lists GPUs: 220k+. Cap: SpaceX Mid-South page figure; distinct from the Musk-stated mix fact on this record (150k H100 + 50k H200 + 30k GB200 = 230k on that accounting)

On the data center map

Every tracked data center is on this map, centered on xAI Colossus. Pan or zoom out to see how close rivals are building.

Free to use on your site, with a link back to DEPLOY.
The story of xAI Colossus (Memphis)
Announced capex
$18B
Grid
Grid connected in stages: the TVA board approved 150 MW on 7 November 2024, requested through Memphis Light, Gas and Water, which was upgrading the site to 50 MW in the meantime. xAI committed $24 million to build a new substation for the additional load, recovered by MLGW through monthly rebates before it takes ownership. Fourteen mobile Voltagrid generators of 2.5 MW each, about 35 MW in total, covered the gap.
GPUs
200K 200,000 H100/H200
Trained here
Grok 4, Grok 3
Derived
Cost per MW
$9M/MW

Every figure is one row in the ledger below with its source. Derived rows are pure arithmetic on the rows above (not new claims). Absent lines mean the fact isn't on record yet.

In clusterTennessee(54)

The deal

utility
Solaris Energy Infrastructure · On-site gas turbine fleet powering the campus behind the meter.
chip supplier
NVIDIA · 555,000 Nvidia GPUs at full 2 GW.
developer
xAI · Owner and operator.

Power

Power source
behind the meter gas
Interconnection
Grid connected in stages: the TVA board approved 150 MW on 7 November 2024, requested through Memphis Light, Gas and Water, which was upgrading the site to 50 MW in the meantime. xAI committed $24 million to build a new substation for the additional load, recovered by MLGW through monthly rebates before it takes ownership. Fourteen mobile Voltagrid generators of 2.5 MW each, about 35 MW in total, covered the gap.
Water
Cooled with treated wastewater (about 3 million gallons/day) piped from the purpose-built Colossus Water Recycling Plant, avoiding an equivalent draw on Memphis drinking water; on-site power is from methane gas turbines.

Solaris on-site gas turbines, 1.10 GW gas, Under construction. About 400 MW currently serving xAI; Solaris expects over 1.1 GW operating for xAI by Q2 2027.

County water status: Severe drought (D2) in Shelby County, week of 2026-09-22 (US Drought Monitor). Data centers are large water users for cooling; this is the neutral local water picture.

Silicon on site

Every AI chip publicly attributed to xAI Colossus (Memphis) on the DEPLOY registry. Quantity hints are unstructured because underlying disclosures vary by an order of magnitude. Source links per row.

  1. as of 2026-01-15

    Second-wave upgrade GPUs added late 2024

    reported

    Introl

  2. as of 2024-09-01

    ~100,000 GPUs live in first cluster (Sep 2024); scaled toward 200,000 across the complex

    reported

    SemiAnalysis

Why here

xAI Colossus sits on former industrial site in Tennessee, Memphis. It draws on behind the meter gas power, interconnection is Grid connected in stages: the TVA board approved 150 MW on 7 November 2024, requested through Memphis Light, Gas and Water, which was upgrading the site to 50 MW in the meantime. xAI committed $24 million to build a new substation for the additional load, recovered by MLGW through monthly rebates before it takes ownership. Fourteen mobile Voltagrid generators of 2.5 MW each, about 35 MW in total, covered the gap.. This siting summary is composed from the record's held fields, not speculation; see methodology.

Financial structure

Reported buildout cost
$18B journalist report

Regulatory paper trail

The filings and rules on record for this site and its jurisdiction, most recent first. Each is a sourced, dated artifact you can follow to the primary document.

NHTSA Recall: Zoox Robotaxi Software Update for Heavy Smoke Visibility (26E044)operational restriction · 2026-07-15 · United States
FCC Proposed Fines Against Drone Companies (July 2026)other · 2026-07-10 · United States
FAA Proposed Rule: Enabling Supersonic Overland Flight (July 2026)operational restriction · 2026-07-02 · United States

Investment, workforce and specs

GPUs
200,000 H100/H200 source

Estimated compute: the claimed 200,000 H100/H200 chips are on the order of 20x the compute used to train a GPT-4-class model. Derived from the chip-count claim, not measured (basis).

AI models here

Reported model-to-campus links, first-party sourced. Companies rarely disclose where a model trains, so this is sparse by nature.

Facilities at this campus

Timeline

  2. Aug 2026
    party added
    utility: Solaris Energy Infrastructure
  3. Sep 2026
    Current: Partially energized

Sources

c174e6dd-1a31-4984-be75-5ca3adf7aafa · Tracked with DEPLOY's verified-vs-claimed methodology. Every term is defined in the glossary. Announced numbers are claims, not built capacity.

Head-to-head

xAI Colossus vs xAI Colossus 2 Data Center →

Common questions

What is xAI Colossus (Memphis)?
xAI Colossus (Memphis) is an AI data center campus tracked on the DEPLOY registry, located in Memphis. DEPLOY records its capacity as a dated, sourced ledger: announced gigawatts versus actually energized gigawatts, never a press-release total.
How much power will xAI Colossus (Memphis) use?
xAI Colossus (Memphis) has 2 GW of announced capacity on the DEPLOY registry, of which 1 GW is recorded as energized, an announced-to-energized gap of 1 GW. Each figure is individually dated and sourced.
Who is building xAI Colossus (Memphis)?
xAI is recorded as a party to xAI Colossus (Memphis) on the DEPLOY registry. The full party list, with each role, is on the record.
Is xAI Colossus (Memphis) operating yet?
As of the most recent verification on the DEPLOY registry, xAI Colossus (Memphis) is partially energized. DEPLOY tracks the lifecycle from announced through energized, so the current state reflects sourced evidence, not the original announcement.
How verified is the data on xAI Colossus (Memphis)?
A human editor has reviewed this record for the indexed registry. Every capacity figure is an append-only, dated claim resolved to the highest-evidence tier; superseded claims are kept but excluded from the current view.

Deploy Watch

Track xAI Colossus (Memphis) on Deploy.

We notify you when energized capacity, lifecycle state, or a new dated capacity claim changes against primary-source evidence, not when the developer issues a press release.

Cite this page

DEPLOY. (2026). xAI Colossus (Memphis): AI data center campus record. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://registry.deploy.report/datacenters/xai-colossus-memphis

More citation formats (MLA, Chicago, BibTeX) →
CC BY 4.0

The verified data on this page is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license: reuse the facts freely, with attribution to DEPLOY (deploy.report). The prose, design, and any imagery are not included and keep their own rights.

Machine-readable surfaces