WTF?! Elon Musk has big generative-AI ambitions, and he's been pouring money into a new data center being constructed at Tesla's Austin Gigafactory. A new video has popped up on YouTube, giving us a sweeping view of the progress. It also reveals something that's got PC enthusiasts buzzing – three gigantic cooling fans being installed that look straight out of a gamer's wildest dreams.
These absolutely colossal fans, destined for the cooling building of Tesla's Austin Dojo data center, have many drawing parallels with graphics cards. "Damnit Jensen, you've done it again," uttered one user on X with a photo showing a make-do RTX 5090 photoshopped onto the cooling fans.
Damnit Jenson, you've done it again! $TSLA $NVDA pic.twitter.com/tW3fzYm5b4
– Brandon Smith (@BLSmith2112) June 19, 2024
But as amusing as the memes are, these monster fans are serious business for Tesla. The company's AI ambitions will likely require stupendous amounts of cooling to keep racks of power-hungry GPUs from melting into a puddle of silicon. AI model training is an incredibly compute-intensive workload that leans way harder on graphics processors than CPUs.
For instance, GPUs like Nvidia's beastly H100 need liquid cooling to function fully. So it's no surprise that the AI boom is forcing a full rethink of how data centers get designed and built to handle the insane cooling demands. The video shows that Tesla is getting in on the game too with such infrastructure.
The video also shows what appears to be groundwork for an artificial water reservoir on the site, with a crew laying out massive black sheets on top. While Tesla hasn't detailed its purposes, keeping a healthy supply of water is crucial for large data centers' cooling systems and power generation needs. The biggest server farms can guzzle billions of gallons annually.
Behind the scenes, the facility's road to completion has been anything but smooth sailing. A report from The Information suggested that Elon Musk has been "furious" over the delays plaguing the project, which is critical to achieving his vision of full self-driving capabilities for Tesla's electric vehicles.
When Musk toured the site back in mid-April, he found a facility still missing most of its roof and ground floor due to delivery snafus, inclement weather, and other construction woes. His tunneling venture, The Boring Company, was supposed to build an underground road for Cybertrucks to autonomously traverse the campus. But with that tunnel yet to materialize, the data center's ground floor has been left in limbo.
The fallout was swift – Amir Mirshahi, the project's director of infrastructure, was given his walking papers.
Things haven't been going great for Tesla as a whole either. A week after Mirshahi's firing, the company laid off 10% of its workforce – likely a result of slowing demand for the company's EVs. Several senior executives have also bid adieu to the electric automaker amid a challenging quarter that saw vehicle deliveries dip by 8.5% year-over-year.