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Data Centers Going Off-Grid with Natural Gas to ‘Find Any Way to Get Power’

Natural Gas Intelligence · last updated

Behind-the-meter power generation was getting scant attention before billionaire Elon Musk installed natural gas turbines at his Memphis xAI facility a year ago and launched what would become one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in a matter of months, not years.

a map showing the location of microgrids in the Lower 48

VoltaGrid LLC gas generators arrived at the site in June 2024 and by early September were powering the data center, dubbed Colossus, equipped with 100,000 Nvidia chips and then doubled that amount within a few months.

“From start to finish, it was done in 122 days,” Musk posted on X in early September.

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