(Planet Labs PBC)

Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center is “MACROHARD”

Satellite photos of the roof of xAI’s new Colossus 2 data center shout a message to the world that it aims to take on Microsoft.

Jon Keegan

10/22/25 1:28PM

You can’t say Elon Musk doesn’t follow through on his weirdest side quests.

In August, Musk posted on X that xAI was going to build software to compete with Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity apps. As he likes to do, Musk picked a name that would make middle school boys giggle: Macrohard.

Musk explained: “In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.”

Musk’s followers weren’t sure if this was just another meme-worthy gag, but he doubled down on the project in follow-up posts.

Musk posted that xAI was so serious about building the Macrohard software suite that he would emblazon the name on the roof of the company’s 1-gigawatt Colossus 2 data center in South Memphis, Tennessee:

We are literally painting MACROHARD on the roof of the Colossus II supercompute cluster in Memphis big enough so you can read it from space
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2025

We have been monitoring the Colossus 2 site from satellite photos, and Planet Labs helped us out with some great shots of the new signage, which can in fact be seen from space.

On October 9, the roof of the larger of the two main buildings at the Colossus 2 site was a featureless white. But by October 11, the first large letters appeared on the roof. By October 13, the work was complete.

(Photos: Planet Labs PBC)

The data center sits on the southern border of Tennessee, to take advantage of imported energy from Alabama, coming from the power plant it operates just down the road from Colossus 2.

Musk is reportedly racing to finish construction of the site, but needs another $18 billion to secure the remaining 300,000 Nvidia GPUs to power the facility, which will be used for running and training xAI’s Grok AI model.

Rani Molla15h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

17h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla19h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla20h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan20h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea