The end goal is finally in sight for Elon Musk, nearly two years after he announced plans to expand the Colossus supercomputer to over a million GPUs. The billionaire said on X that 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs will be operational by next week, with another 220,000 coming online in November. He also added that another 220,000 units will come online by late December “if we get lucky.”

These numbers would add to the 110,000 GB200 and 440,000 GB300 GPUs already operating at Colossus 2, plus the 150,000 H100, 50,000 H200, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs at Colossus 1. This would bring SpaceXAI’s GB300 GPUs to 1.1 million units, with its total GPUs in operation to 1,440,000 units. This is quite an achievement, especially given that the company is behind its rivals by several years — SpaceXAI is only three years old, while Anthropic and OpenAI are six and ten years old, respectively. Interestingly, the Colossus 1 site, which features a combination of Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, is inefficient for training Grok, so Musk rented it out to Anthropic for inference instead. On the other hand, Colossus 2 solely uses Blackwell GPUs, ensuring that there won’t be any bottlenecks.

While Elon Musk essentially begged for Jensen Huang to give him these GPUs, getting his hands on them isn’t currently the hardest part. One of the biggest issues facing data center build-outs right now is power, and SpaceXAI solved this by bringing its own. This has resulted in some controversies with the surrounding neighborhood, ending in a lawsuit against the company for running unpermitted gas turbines. It has since promised to remove them, but only over a span of one year as its own 1.2-GW power plant comes online.

Running a million GPUs or more on a single site is an impressive achievement, but SpaceXAI isn’t the only one trying to reach this goal. Broadcom said in 2024 that it has three hyperscale customers gunning for this target by 2027 but didn’t mention who these customers were. As for Elon Musk, the 1-million-GPU target is just the beginning. He said that SpaceXAI will grow its data center capacity sevenfold by 2027, and he’s even aiming for 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs by 2030. These data centers won’t be limited to the ground as well, with SpaceX planning to launch an Orbital Data Center System with a million satellites, despite Jensen Huang saying that it’s a “dream” for now.

Tower Semiconductor and the government of Japan plan to co-invest a total of $4 billion in the company's Japanese operations to turn regional fabs into a massive manufacturing base for optical-connectivity semiconductors, reports Nikkei. The dual-track expansion will repurpose an idled fab, maximize output of an existing 300mm facility, and eventually add another 300mm fab, thus boosting Tower's Japanese capacity to the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month by 2029.

Track One: Convert and expand

The first stage, called Track One, involves converting Tower's idle 200-mm Fab 6 in Arai, Niigata Prefecture, into a 300mm manufacturing facility for silicon photonics (SiPho) and advanced optical packaging (i.e., bonding electronic integrated circuits with photonic integrated circuits), as well as expanding the output of SiGe EICs (Silicon-Germanium Electronic Integrated Circuits) and SiPho PICs (Photonic Integrated Circuits) at 300-mm Fab 7 near Uozu, Toyama Prefecture.

Fab 7 is already fully qualified and is in mass production of various SiGe EICs and SiPho PICs using various process technologies, including the latest TPS65SG and several other TPS65-series 65nm-class SiGe fabrication nodes, as well as TPS45PHD 45nm-class SiPho manufacturing technology. The plan is to expand Fab 7's output as significantly as possible to meet growing demand for optical engines by the AI industry. Such an approach enables the company to add output progressively as additional equipment is installed, rather than waiting for an entirely new fab and process flows to qualify.

Track One is scheduled to reach full production readiness in the fourth quarter of 2027. Tower expects Track One to enable it to earn approximately $3.6 billion in revenue and $1.2 billion in net profit in FY2028.

Track Two: Build new fab

The second stage, called Track Two, commences in parallel and is considerably more ambitious. Tower intends to construct another 300mm manufacturing facility next to Fab 7 in Uozu that will increase the company's output of SiGe EICs and SiPho PICs by several times. As a result, Tower will have two sites in Japan producing EICs and PICs and one — the converted Fab 6 — assembling optical engines using these components.

The second stage is expected to start contributing materially to Tower's financial results in 2029.

Tower expects its Japanese production capacity to ultimately reach the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month in 2029, around 40 times higher than 2025 levels, and plans to hire approximately 200 people. The scale of the project reflects rapidly growing demand for optical connectivity in AI infrastructure. According to Nikkei, Tower controls more than 80% of the contract production market for optical communications semiconductors used in servers and serves some of the industry leaders, including Marvell, so it needs massive scale.

Tower plans to invest $3 billion of its own money in its two expansion tracks, while Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) will provide another $1 billion, bringing the overall project to roughly $4 billion.

Tower admits that companies like Intel, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries are currently ahead in co-packaged optics (CPO), so the Japanese investment is not merely about adding capacity, but also about setting the stage for its CPO plans. For now, Tower intends to bring CPO and preceding manufacturing technologies to its Uozu, Toyama Prefecture, site. While the company has not disclosed any details about its CPO roadmap, even its latest process technologies for EICs and PICs should be more or less good enough to bring optics closer to compute silicon.

Tower's Japan restructuring

Tower Semiconductor's plans for major expansion in Japan also coincide with a restructuring of the company's local manufacturing operations. But understanding what is changing requires a short history lesson.

Tower established its Japanese manufacturing presence in 2014 by forming TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Co. (TPSCo) with Panasonic, owning a 51% controlling stake while Panasonic retained 49% and contributed its fabs in Uozu, Tonami, and Arai. Following Panasonic's exit from the semiconductor business in 2020, Panasonic's stake passed to Nuvoton Technology Corporation Japan (NTCJ).

The most important asset is Fab 7 in Uozu, a 300mm facility that Tower has gradually transformed from a former Panasonic fab into one of its key specialty manufacturing sites that now supports 65nm-class SiGe and 45nm-class SiPho technologies.

Tower and Nuvoton are now effectively dismantling the original TPSCo structure. Under an agreement announced in March 2026 and expected to close in April 2027, Tower will take full ownership and operational control of Fab 7 and its 300mm foundry business, while Nuvoton will take full ownership of TPSCo and Fab 5 in Tonami. At the same time, Tower is resurrecting the former Arai facility, Fab 6, as a 300mm SiPho and advanced optical packaging site and plans to build another 300mm fab adjacent to Fab 7.

In short, what started as a relatively inexpensive way for Tower to obtain Japanese manufacturing capacity from Panasonic more than a decade ago is now evolving into a major Tower-owned 300mm SiPho and SiGe production hub, which is set to increase the company's output and revenue by multiple times.

Meta's new AI agent Muse is powered by AMD EPYC Turin host systems, with each sandbox sporting two dedicated cores and 8GB of memory. Blogger Evan Hoffman and analyst Tae Kim both discovered that Muse will run some rudimentary Ubuntu commands if prompted, passing along the output to help identify things like the specs of the host system. More concerning is that Muse seems able to execute commands that might be unsafe, with Hoffman claiming that Muse offered to set up SSH to Muse's private VM.

Both Kim and Hoffman asked Muse about the VM's specs, and in both instances, Muse revealed that it's running on AMD EPYC 9D25 CPUs, a high-density Turin chip with up to 128 cores (two of which are generally fused off or reserved). The VMs are running on Ubuntu 24.04 and using Linux kernel 7.0. The systems hosting Muse don't include GPUs. The AI agent revealed that Meta uses separate GPU servers for inference, isolating the agent to CPU-only sandboxes.

The agent suggests that each user gets their own private sandbox that's persistent, which allows us to do some math on how many people an individual tray can host. Assuming a 2P system that offers up to 510 vCPUs with 2TB of memory, hosting up to 254 Muse users. Muse has reportedly passed over 500,000 daily active users as of a few days ago, which would come out to somewhere around 2,000 server trays with dual EPYC 9D25 CPUs and 2TB of memory.

This is just some rough napkin math; don't take it as law. It's possible Meta has CPU-only servers deployed with multiple different chips to host Muse, and it's also possible there's overhead in the configuration. Turin chips support up to 6TB of memory with high-density DIMMs, for instance. Still, EPYC hosts seem popular for this use case, mainly because of their core density, as even a dual-core sandbox can add up quickly when multiplied across hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of users.

Muse isn't completely open. Hoffman shared an example where an attempted command failed due to improper permissions when Muse tried to query the kernel buffer. Presumably, sudo (admin) commands would be blocked as well.

However, there might still be some security loopholes. Hoffman says that Muse offered to set up SSH into the private Muse VM. With a reverse SSH tunnel — where the destination machine initiates the connection, bypassing the firewall — an attacker may be able to execute more damaging commands.

Meta's David Singleton says this is intended behavior, however, describing Muse as "a free computer in the cloud." Meta has an extensive white paper on the security architecture of Muse published on its research website.

Noctua is teaming up with Forced Physics DCT to explore whether the company’s JouleForce micro-channel array-based cooling can be adapted for desktop PCs and workstations. The long–term partnership will focus on developing a quieter way to use the tech, although Noctua said in its announcement that the partnership is not tied to any specific product or release date.

Claimed to be a new third path to cooling, JouleForce goes beyond traditional air and liquid cooling methods. While it is still based on air-cooling, its capabilities far exceed today’s modern CPU coolers, with the ability to cool over 2000W of thermal energy. The technology uses densely packed micro-channels designed to improve heat transfer. According to Forced Physics, its geometry prevents the boundary layer that normally forms along cooling surfaces, allowing heat to be extracted along the entire length of each channel. This essentially enables large amounts of heat to be removed using air alone, without requiring a liquid-cooling loop.

While that sounds impressive, bringing the technology to desktop PCs comes with a major challenge. The micro-channel arrays currently have a pressure drop that is “an order of magnitude and more” above the range of conventional PC fans. Thus, in its current state, JouleForce relies on industrial blowers, high-speed centrifugal fans, or even vacuum pumps to push air through the arrays.

Noctua’s expertise could prove useful as the company is known for developing some of the best performing PC fans. The partnership will investigate ways to reduce the pressure required by the micro-channel arrays or generate the necessary static pressure without making desktop systems excessively loud. “The pressure levels this technology requires in today’s implementations are currently supplied by equipment nobody would want on or under their desk, so this is a demanding, long-term engineering task – and one that we are eager to tackle,” said Roland Mossig, CEO at Noctua.

For now, Noctua and Forced Physics are still in the early research stage, with both companies planning to share updates as the project reaches significant milestones. If the two companies can crack the airflow and acoustic challenges, JouleForce could eventually make its way to desktop PCs. At the same time, Noctua would have a serious advantage in the market compared to other heatsink manufacturers.