xAI finishes Grok V9-Medium (1.5T params) and brings Colossus 2 online with 1 million GPUs

xAI announced it has completed training Grok V9-Medium, a 1.5-trillion-parameter foundation model aimed squarely at the coding domain — roughly three times the size of its current production model. The company says the model was trained partly on real Cursor data to sharpen its agentic coding capabilities, with a public release targeted for mid-June 2026. The scale jump positions xAI to compete more directly with Anthropic's and OpenAI's coding-focused offerings.

Underpinning the model is xAI's Colossus 2 supercluster, which the company says reached operational status with 1 million GPUs — a milestone it claims beats Meta's Hyperion timeline by roughly 18 months. The compute buildout reflects xAI's strategy of brute-force scaling, and alongside the model news it released Grok Imagine 1.5 Preview, an image-to-video model with improved realism and audio synchronization. xAI also opened Grok Build access inside the Warp coding terminal for SuperGrok and X Premium subscribers.

The scale ambitions come with controversy: in a bid to dismiss a NAACP lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines powering its data centers, the Justice Department argued the company is 'vital' to national security, including military operations. That framing collides with the parallel Anthropic export-control saga, highlighting how AI infrastructure is increasingly entangled with national-security politics. Watch whether Grok V9-Medium's benchmarks justify the 3x parameter increase and how the environmental litigation resolves given the government's intervention.