Elon Musk says he’s staying in Memphis ‘night and day’ guiding data center buildout
by: David Royer
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Elon Musk says he’s spending up to four days a week in Memphis supervising construction of his company’s supercomputer clusters as their presence grows in the metro area.
As for the growth in compute power for those data centers, he says the company could go from about 3 gigawatts online by the end of this year to about 13 — or more — next year.
“I’ve been spending personally a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week, night and day, just getting the Memphis supercompute cluster of Colossus 2 online,” Musk said in a SpaceX earnings call Tuesday.
SpaceX is the parent company of SpaceXAI, the “super intelligence” company that is running or building at least four data centers in Memphis and Southaven, Mississippi.
“At this point I would say I’m fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027. That would be in addition to the roughly three gigawatts, maybe two and a half to three gigawatts, that we’ll have online by the end of this year,” Musk said.
Cooling all that infrastructure is a limiting factor to growth, so the company is also building cooling infrastructure that could handle 20 gigawatts of compute. Having that much power online is a small possibility by next year, he said.
Musk also says he plans to have the most powerful training cluster online in the second quarter of next year. This could get Grok to be the best model, or at least more competitive.
“We’re seeing the fastest growth I’ve ever seen in my life for Grok Bot,” he said.
Data center construction is fueling jobs and traffic in the area around the Tennessee-Mississippi state line.
SpaceXAI’s careers page shows more than 160 jobs open as of Wednesday in Memphis and Southaven. Most are related to the construction of the data center — engineers, welders, IT techs, and construction managers. Some are also for operations and support roles.
Residents say traffic from dump trucks and construction vehicles is choking local roads, and they see busloads of workers being shuttled from rented parking lots in the area down to construction sites.
One pastor said he is leasing 800 parking spaces at his church to SpaceXAI for construction workers who are shuttled from there to the site.
“We were given a call and asked if we could help alleviate the parking issue that a company had; we didn’t know who the company was. We were willing to do it, and once we found out it was SpaceX, it was no problem,” said Bishop Vincent Mathews, Pastor, Tabernacle Church Southaven.
Where is Musk supposedly living while in Memphis? The location is not known, but he claimed in a podcast last month that he was staying in an Airstream trailer somewhere in the Memphis area, calling the trailer his “palace.”
On Tuesday night, the Memphis City Council rejected an indefinite moratorium on new data centers in the city in a 6-6 vote after two heated council meetings. Instead, they opted for a shorter 135-day pause on new facilities, along with new zoning and land-use regulations.
Mayor Paul Young has said there would be a 90-day pause on new data centers in the city.
About Post Author
