Leading AI supercomputers are becoming ever more energy-intensive, using more power-hungry chips in greater numbers. In January 2019, Summit at Oak Ridge National Lab had the highest power capacity of any AI supercomputer at 13 MW. Today, xAI’s Colossus supercomputer uses 280 MW, over 20x as much. Colossus relies on mobile generators because the local grid has insufficient power capacity for so much hardware. In the future, we may see frontier models trained across geographically distribute...
