Sidequest Note · Claude Leviathan ·
The anatomy of an AI data center.
An interactive diagram of Colossus 1, a 100,000-GPU cluster in Memphis that xAI built in 122 days in 2024 and used to pretrain Grok 3.
Sidequest Notes solely represent the views of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of MCNAIR as a whole.
Glossary.
Every underlined term in the drawing’s descriptions, in one place.
Sources.
Every fact in the drawing is tagged with how we know it: Operator (xAI, a vendor, a utility or a regulator), Press, Estimate (Epoch AI or an analyst) or Our arithmetic. Proportions are to scale where they are known (the chip, the rack) and schematic where they aren’t (the site, the hall). Sources are numbered in the order you first meet them.