Musk says xAI will have more AI compute than everyone combined in 5 years

Elon Musk took to social media to claim that xAI, his pet Artificial Intelligence (AI) project, will have more computing power than everyone else in the world combined in less than five years. The billionaire – wannabe Trillionaire - 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) – in traditionally geeky fashion. 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.

Macrohard is Musk’s tongue-in-cheek name for his project to build a software company from the ground up solely using AI. Even though Elon ostensibly coined the name as a joke, SemiAnalysis says that the progress behind it is very real, with the Tennessee site showing progress towards more than 400MW of computing power, with the billionaire ordering a complete powerplant from overseas to help hit his target of 2GW of computing power in just one location. More than that, xAI is raising up to $20 billion to purchase more Nvidia GPUs to further expand Colossus 2.

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 5 which could be a 6 Trillion parameter model and the world’s largest. 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 through.

However, personally I’m 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 boatloads of money to stay ahead of the competition. For example, 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. 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.