MEMPHIS, Tenn. — xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, will build the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, officials announced Wednesday.

The multi-billion dollar “Gigafactory of Compute” will be the largest capital investment by a new-to-market company in Memphis history, Greater Memphis Chamber CEO Ted Townsend said.

It is expected to open sometime before the end of this calendar year, pending approval by local and state agencies.

xAI will occupy a former manufacturing facility in Memphis. Townsend did not identify the specific site at the company’s request, citing “global security concerns.”

The Greater Memphis Chamber said their team moved at “lightning speed” to ensure xAI would choose Memphis.

“This landmark achievement signals a new era of growth and innovation for Memphis,” a Chamber press release said.

“The stage is set for Memphis to become the world leader in artificial intelligence and computing,” said state Rep. Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis). “It’s really impossible to overstate the economic and technological impact of developing the largest supercomputer in the world — right here in Memphis. Grind City is on the verge of adding a new nickname: the Supercomputer City.”

xAI’s website states the company is “working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery. We are guided by our mission to advance our collective understanding of the universe.

“Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Collectively our team contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, μTransfer, and SimCLR. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

“Our team is advised by Dan Hendrycks who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.

“We partner closely with X Corp to bring our technology to more than 500 million users of the X app.”

Speculation on a potential project by Musk has been bubbling on social media this week after some claimed to have seen the tech billionaire in Memphis. He posted on the X platform, which he also owns, that he had just eaten french toast in Memphis.

So far Wednesday afternoon, Musk had not made any statement on X.