Forget Grok. Musk's AI Edge Is Infrastructure, Not Software

Elon Musk’s ambitions for artificial intelligence are coming together in a former vacuum-cleaner factory in Memphis, Tennessee. It houses a data center known as Colossus 1, containing racks of servers spanning an area more than 13 football fields in size and chugging 300 megawatts of electricity at any given moment (enough for hundreds of thousands of homes). As of this month, those computers will be powering Claude, the chatbot created by Musk’s new frenemy, Anthropic PBC.

The Tesla Inc. billionaire was in a very different headspace in February, when he called Anthropic an “evil” AI lab that hated Western civilization. But it’s become clear that Musk’s AI model, Grok, doesn’t have hope of competing with either Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The former is on track to bring in $40 billion in revenue, mostly from the lucrative business of selling to companies; Grok barely registers in IT department spending anywhere.