Elon Musk’s Grok AI ‘compute factory’ will use Dell and Supermicro servers

However, as of today, Grok is only available to X’s $16 per month Premium+ subscribers. Presumably that’s because the physical capacity of the system remains limited. Musk has previously said he wants to have Grok to reach its higher-capacity supercomputer incarnation — housed in what Musk has dubbed “the gigafactory of compute” — by late 2025.

The whole project is a cocktail of old and new ingredients of the sort the tech industry excels at. Elon Musk is the most famous tech entrepreneur of his generation. The startup he founded to build Grok, xAI, recently raised a huge $6 billion in series B funding.

Nvidia, whose hardware will be used by Dell and Supermicro, now vies with Microsoft to be the world’s most valuable company with a market cap around $3 trillion.

Meanwhile, the world can’t get enough of a new generation of chatbots, a sector Musk thinks Grok can dominate. Dell and Supermicro are old hands by comparison but have a long track record of making computer systems.

The term “Grok” is jargon used loosely in programming to signify that something is fully intuited or understood. Its origin is widely claimed online to be from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

If Musk and Nvidia’s GPUs get most of the publicity around Grok, the involvement of Dell and Supermicro is at least as significant. Supermicro, for example, is known for its cooling expertise, a critical part of any datacenter clustering, as well as its understanding of the Nvidia platform.