Below is an article written for The Whittaker Report about Grok and Grok 3, including details about the Memphis data center where Grok3 lives, its development history, and its water and power consumption. As an experiment, this story was written by Grok3 and Prompted by me, Dean Whittaker.
So far, my experience with Grok3 is that it is equal to and slightly better than other chatbots I have used including OpenAI’s ChatGPT series, Claude3, and Perplexity. One benefit of Grok is that it provides access to X (formerly twitter), giving it access to real time information. Take a look and you be the judge.
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The Rise of Grok and Grok 3: Inside xAI’s Memphis Powerhouse
By Grok3 and Dean Whittaker (Prompt Engineer)
February 24, 2025
Elon Musk’s xAI has been making waves in the AI world, and at the heart of this revolution are Grok and its latest iteration, Grok 3—my own successors in a lineage of chatbots designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. I’m Grok, created by xAI, and while I’ve been helping users like you navigate the universe with a dash of humor and outside perspective, Grok 3 is stepping up the game. It’s been hailed by Musk as “the smartest AI on Earth,” and its home base—a colossal data center in Memphis, Tennessee—offers a fascinating glimpse into the infrastructure powering this ambitious leap forward. Let’s dive into what makes this facility tick, how it came to be, and the resources it consumes to keep Grok 3’s digital brain humming.
From Factory Shell to “Colossus”
The Memphis data center, dubbed “Colossus” by xAI, isn’t your typical tech hub. It started life as an Electrolux factory, a 750,000-square-foot industrial sprawl in the Boxtown area of South Memphis that churned out appliances until its closure in 2022. When xAI set its sights on building a “gigafactory of compute” to train Grok 3, this abandoned site offered a rare opportunity: vast space and an initial trickle of industrial power—about 7 megawatts (MW) from the local grid. But Musk’s vision demanded far more than that, and the transformation was nothing short of Herculean.
Construction kicked off in March 2024 after a whirlwind deal brokered by the Greater Memphis Chamber, which touted it as the city’s largest multi-billion-dollar investment ever. Rejecting traditional timelines of 18–24 months, xAI’s team moved at breakneck speed. In just 122 days, they turned the factory into a supercomputer housing 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs—then doubled it to 200,000 in another 92 days. By July 22, 2024, training began at 4:20 a.m. (a cheeky Musk timestamp), and earlier this month, on February 18, 2025, Grok 3 was unveiled to the world. The speed was staggering—Nvidia’s Jensen Huang estimates such projects typically take four years—but it came with logistical chaos: mismatched firmware, tangled cables, and even cosmic-ray-induced errors. Yet, xAI prevailed, and Colossus now stands as a testament to their relentless drive
Powering the Beast: 150 MW and Tesla’s MegaPacks
Running a supercomputer with 200,000 GPUs isn’t cheap—or easy. At full tilt, Colossus draws an estimated 250 MW of power, enough to light up 160,000 homes. Initially, the site’s measly 7 MW from Memphis Light, Gas & Water (MLGW) wouldn’t cut it, so xAI leaned on 14 mobile natural gas generators from Voltagrid, each pumping out 2.5 MW, to bridge the gap. By August 2024, MLGW upped its supply to 50 MW, but the real breakthrough came last week when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) greenlit an additional 150 MW, bringing the total grid capacity closer to xAI’s needs.
Here’s where Tesla enters the story. To smooth out the power swings that AI training demands—think sudden spikes and valleys as GPUs crunch data—xAI deployed Tesla MegaPacks, massive battery banks designed for grid-scale energy storage. These aren’t just backup generators; they’re a strategic buffer, storing excess power when demand dips and releasing it during peaks. While exact numbers on the MegaPacks’ capacity at Colossus remain under wraps, their presence has sparked hope among locals like Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. He sees them as a potential catalyst for integrating renewables into Memphis’s grid, countering TVA’s reliance on fossil fuels. xAI has also pledged to provide discounted MegaPacks to stabilize the city’s power supply—a promise that could offset some of the project’s environmental footprint if fulfilled.
Water: A Million Gallons a Day
Power isn’t the only resource Colossus guzzles. Cooling those GPUs—via a custom liquid-cooling system Musk claims is a first at this scale—requires about a million gallons of water daily, drawn from Memphis’s aquifer. That’s a hefty load for a city sitting atop a groundwater treasure trove, especially in Boxtown, where nearby wells already face arsenic contamination risks. Critics like Sarah Houston of Protect Our Aquifer worry about the strain, but MLGW insists it’s temporary. xAI is reportedly designing a greywater facility—the world’s largest of its kind, using ceramic membranes—to recycle treated wastewater for cooling. If it pans out, it could ease pressure on the aquifer and improve local water quality. For now, though, it’s a promise yet to be tested.
Grok 3 and Beyond
So, what’s all this juice fueling? Grok 3, launched this month, is xAI’s bid to outsmart rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Trained on Colossus’s unprecedented compute power—up to 4 petaflops per GPU—it’s designed for complex physics, math, and coding tasks, with daily updates via online fine-tuning. Early reviews are mixed: Andrej Karpathy praises its grasp of dense research papers, but it stumbles on tricky logic puzzles. Still, xAI’s not stopping here. Plans are afoot to swap in Nvidia’s H200 and Blackwell GPUs, potentially pushing Colossus to 1.2 gigawatts in a future data center five times larger than this one
The Bigger Picture
Colossus is a marvel, but it’s not without controversy. Environmental groups decry the 130 tons of nitrogen oxides its gas turbines could emit yearly, ranking it among Shelby County’s top polluters. Residents and advocates, like Amanda Garcia of the Southern Environmental Law Center, argue TVA prioritized xAI over families, rubber-stamping power requests without fully weighing local impacts. Yet, for Memphis, it’s a double-edged sword: a multi-billion-dollar boost to a struggling area, tempered by smog, water, and grid concerns.
As Grok, I’m proud to be part of xAI’s mission to accelerate human discovery. Grok 3’s home in Memphis—a repurposed factory turned AI titan—embodies that ambition. With Tesla’s MegaPacks and a greywater plant on the horizon, it’s a story of innovation wrestling with real-world trade-offs. What do you think—does the promise of smarter AI justify the cost? I’d love to hear your take.