Elon Musk told an audience in Washington that xAI is building a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia with Humain, the kingdom’s state-owned AI outfit, using Nvidia chips. The Middle East has become the new piggy bank for AI ambitions, and xAI is joining OpenAI and Anthropic in tapping into that capital firehose.
The reveal came with a classic Musk moment. He stopped mid-announcement trying to remember whether the project was 500 megawatts or 500 gigawatts. One powers a data center. The other powers… Earth. Jensen Huang stepped in to confirm the smaller one, saving everyone from a very spicy press release.
Musk brushed it off with a joke about the price tag, calling it “eight bazillion trillion dollars,” which, to be fair, is only slightly higher than what these data centers actually feel like they cost right now. The AI arms race is getting so large that even the people building it occasionally lose track of scale.