Elon Musk's xAI is spending at least $400 million building its supercomputer in Memphis. It's short on electricity.

Elon Musk has said his artificial intelligence startup xAI is building the world's largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, and documents viewed by Business Insider show the company is putting hundreds of millions of dollars toward it.

Fourteen construction permit applications have been filed with a local planning and development agency since June 2024, when the deal was first announced.

Combined, they represent a total of $405.9 million in estimated project costs. The filings also show that xAI won't be able to get enough power from the local grid to run 1 million GPUs in Memphis, as Musk has said the company plans to do — unless it builds its own power generation on-site.

The permit applications were submitted for a range of electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and other work, including a $30 million installation of computer equipment and the construction of a $3.9 million perimeter fence built to withstand car crashes.

The most recent permit application on file, submitted in January, is for the construction of a new electrical substation.

Musk, who raised $12 billion in funding last year for xAI, has said that the site's "gigafactory of compute" comprises 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, half of which were installed in just 122 days, and wants to eventually scale to 1 million GPUs.

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