Elon Musk Developing A Liquid-Cooled 'Gigafactory' For AI Data Centers

Elon Musk's Texas Tesla Gigafactory is expanding to contain an AI supercomputer cluster, and Supermicro's CEO is a big fan of the cooling solution. Charles Liang, founder and CEO of Supermicro, took to X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate Musk's use of Supermicro's liquid cooling technology for both Tesla's new cluster and xAI's similar supercomputer, which is also on the way.

Liang estimates the impact of Musk leading the move to liquid cooling AI data centers "may lead to preserving 20 billion trees for our planet," obviously referring to the improvements that could be had if liquid cooling were adopted at all data centers worldwide.

AI data centers are well known for their massive power draws, and Supermicro hopes to reduce this strain by pushing liquid cooling. The company claims direct liquid cooling may offer up to an 89 percent reduction in electricity costs of cooling infrastructure compared to air cooling.

In a previous Tweet, Liang clarified that Supermicro's goal is "to boost DLC [direct liquid cooling] adoption from less than 1 percent to 30 percent in a year." Musk is deploying Supermicro's cooling at a major scale for his Tesla Gigafactory supercomputer cluster. The new expansion to the existing Gigafactory will house 50,000 Nvidia GPUs and more Tesla AI hardware to train Tesla's Full Self Driving feature.

The expansion is turning heads thanks to the supermassive fans under construction to chill the liquid cooling, which Musk also recently highlighted in an X post of his own (expand tweet below). Musk estimates the Gigafactory supercomputer will draw 130 megawatts on deployment, with growth up to 500MW expected after Tesla's proprietary AI hardware is also installed. Musk claims that the facility's construction is nearly complete, and it is planned to be ready for deployment in the next few months.

Tesla's Gigafactory supercomputer cluster is not to be confused with Elon's other multi-billion dollar supercomputer cluster, the X/xAI supercomputer, which is also currently under construction. That's right: Elon Musk is building not one but two of the world's largest GPU-powered AI supercomputer clusters. The xAI supercomputer is a bit more well-known than Tesla's, with Musk already having ordered 100,000 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs. xAI will use its supercomputer to train GrokAI, X's quirky AI chatbot alternative that is available to X Premium subscribers.

Also expected to be ready "within a few months," the xAI supercomputer will also be liquid-cooled by Supermicro and already has a planned upgrade path to 300,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs next summer.

According to recent reports, getting the xAI cluster online is a slightly greater priority for Musk than Tesla, as Musk reportedly ordered Nvidia to ship thousands of GPUs originally ordered for Tesla to X instead in June. The move was reported to have delayed Tesla's supercomputer cluster's construction by months, but like so much Musk-centric news, exaggeration is highly likely.