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Elon Musk's xAI Colossus 2 is nowhere near 1 gigawatt capacity, satellite imagery suggests — despite claims, site only has 350 megawatts of cooling capacity
Despite Elon Musk's announcement on Monday that xAI's Colossus 2 data center had reached a 1 GW scale, the supercomputer is not even close to that, a satellite image published by Epoch AI researchers reveals.
Based on 550,000 Nvidia Blackwell AI accelerators, xAI's Colossus 2 is advertised as the industry's first AI facility that consumes one gigawatt of power for AI inference and training. But for now, the data center codenamed 'Macrohard' purportedly only has 350 MW of cooling capacity — not nearly enough to cool down 550,000 Blackwell GPUs at full power, even in winter. As a result, Musk's Jan. 19 announcement may have been premature, to put it mildly. Epoch AI expects the supercomputer to reach 1 GW by May.
xAI's Colossus 2 data center is running, but likely won't reach 1 GW of power until May, despite prior claims by Elon Musk.Our updated analysis shows the facility lacks the cooling capacity to run 550,000 Blackwell GPUs at full power, even in winter conditions. pic.twitter.com/C1mw7e2dDDJanuary 19, 2026
Interestingly, when Grok, xAI's AI bot, was asked about Colossus 2, it confirmed that the launch of the supercomputer may be phased. Furthermore, it recalled media reports claiming that xAI may be using unpermitted gas turbines for extra power.
At the pace that Colossus 2 is being equipped with cooling systems right now, the new supercomputer will become a gigawatt-class machine sometime in May, according to the research. Meanwhile, the machine was once predicted to use a million GPUs, and then Musk said that it could scale to 1.5 GW or even 2 GW when the time comes. When this could happen is not known because xAI needs to get enough AI servers, procure enough power, and then get cooling systems.
Even though xAI's Colossus 2 will hit its 1 GW milestone later than expected, it is still projected to be ahead of rivals from Amazon and OpenAI, according to a graph by Epoch AI. The company will have more resources for AI training, AI inference, and agentic AI workloads than its rival for some time.
The Colossus 2 supercomputer for @Grok is now operational. First Gigawatt training cluster in the world. Upgrades to 1.5GW in April. https://t.co/GpgZ6Pe30sJanuary 17, 2026
Based on the graph's reference lines, the power consumption of the whole city of San Diego averages ~800 MW, Amsterdam consumes around ~1.6 GW, and the power consumption of Los Angeles is about ~2.4 GW, which puts modern frontier AI data centers in the same class as major cities. When fully equipped and ramped, xAI Colossus 2 at roughly 1.3 GW – 1.4 GW, would consume about 1.7× San Diego's power, slightly less than Amsterdam, and around 60% of Los Angeles.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
I think the dodgy gas turbine deployment should be more then just a mere mention. Elon playing with loopholes there and damn resident's health it seems.
The electricity being used on AI is just patently absurd. We’re destroying the planet so fast. At least I’ll hopefully probably be dead before the planet dies.
The electricity being used on AI is just patently absurd. We’re destroying the planet so fast. At least I’ll hopefully probably be dead before the planet dies.
The planet will still be here. Humans are, of course, optional.
Fret not. Knew a climate scientist a decade ago who said, conservatively, the global population will collapse and there’s nothing we can do about it.
This was not alarmist propaganda, just matter of fact. A conclusion from data.
