Colossus 2 targets 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs; storage unclear

Colossus 2 targets about 1.2 million Nvidia Blackwell GPUs across five sites by the end of 2026. The cluster is running while the buildout continues, and the GPU figure remains a target rather than an operating total.

By Grace Kim

What is inside the five-site buildout?

The report calls the operator SpaceXSI and links it to Elon Musk's xAI. The expansion uses a patchwork of site and program labels. Macrohard was announced in March and named as a sly reference to Microsoft; Digital Optimus also appears among the names.

Macroharder and Minihard are assigned roughly 220,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs each, along with 800 Gb network interface cards, and both are configured for AI training.

GunRange is assigned roughly 220,000 GB200 GPUs and 800 Gb NICs for AI training workloads.

Spam has a slightly smaller allocation of roughly 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and is being built for inference.

The disclosed site allocations remain below the 1.2 million-GPU target, so they do not describe the complete cluster. No current operating GPU count accompanies those site figures.

The described platform combines SpaceXSI's Grok large language model with a Tesla-developed AI agent that processes real-time computer screen video, keyboard input and mouse actions.

Musk said: “In principle, it is capable of emulating the function of entire companies. That is why the program is called Macrohard, a funny reference to Microsoft.”

Where are the five sites?

All five datacenters sit just east of the Mississippi River, where southwest Tennessee meets northwest Mississippi, across the Memphis-to-Southaven-to-Tulane Road area in the southeastern United States.

The Southaven Police Department formerly owned the GunRange site along Tulane Road.

Spam occupies a former cold-storage and food-distribution warehouse at 2929 Stateline Road West in Southaven.

Hormel Foods previously owned the Spam property, and its Spam product brand supplied the site's colloquial name.

According to the stated schedule, GunRange will be operational by the end of this month. Spam is scheduled to come fully online by the end of December.

Those dates remain targets rather than confirmed operating data.

What is known about storage?

On November 24, VAST Data first announced that it would supply storage to Elon Musk's xAI, now described as SpaceXSI, for the Colossus data center. DDN followed as a second storage supplier.

Little has been disclosed since about the storage facilities serving the expansion.

Reporting in October 2025 identified VAST Data in xAI's Frontier AI Factory expansion, with online availability set for 2026.

That timing would indicate a Colossus 2 site, although the available information does not assign the deployment to a named facility.

The 2026 date concerns online availability, not a disclosed storage volume.

The reporting assesses that DDN and VAST Data systems are likely used at the Colossus 2 sites. It estimates aggregate capacity at multiple exabytes.

The same assessment identifies SpaceXSI as probably the single largest storage customer for each vendor.

Those relationships and figures remain estimates rather than company-confirmed capacity, revenue or site assignments.

The announcements do not identify storage products, contract values, pricing tiers or firm installed capacity.

How could storage competition develop?

VAST Data and DDN have announced roles in a buildout whose GPU target reaches 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs.

Storage could become a meaningful competitive variable as both suppliers are linked to the same training-and-inference cluster.

The commercial stakes rise if SpaceXSI is the single largest storage customer for both vendors, as the assessment suggests, while the installed storage base remains undisclosed.

The available information does not establish which vendor leads on installed capacity or pricing. No revenue share can yet be assigned to the 1.2 million-GPU roadmap.

The next proof point is vendor-confirmed capacity as GunRange and Spam enter service and the 2026 expansion approaches. Until then, the multiple-exabyte estimate and SpaceXSI's likely status as each vendor's largest storage customer remain unverified commercial claims.