Elon Musk appears to have confirmed that SpaceXAI is building a fourth data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

It comes as the company agreed to remove 69 gas turbines that it uses to power its data centers in the area. Campaigners had launched legal action against the company, claiming the turbines were installed without the correct permits and in contravention of the Clean Air Act.

xAI, Musk’s AI lab, began building data centers in the Memphis area in 2024 to house Colossus, the supercomputer that powers Grok, its AI chatbot. The company has since been rolled into another of Musk’s firms, SpaceX, becoming SpaceXAI and expanding into neocloud services, renting data center space to clients including Anthropic.

Musk’s Minihard data center

Responding to a user on X, Musk's social media platform, who had posted drone footage of a new building under construction at the Memphis data center complex, on Tulane Road near the border between Tennessee and Mississippi, the billionaire said: “To the right is Minihard, which will have the same 220k GB300s with 800 gig NICs as Macroharder, but in an improved, much denser configuration.”

Musk has dubbed the two existing data centers on the site Macrohard and Macroharder, an apparent dig at Microsoft.

DCD reported in March that SpaceXAI had applied for a building permit for a 312,000 sq ft (28,985 sqm) building costing $659 million, but at the time its use had not been confirmed. It is a four-story building, some 75 feet high.

It is not clear if SpaceXAI has sufficient power for an additional 220,000-strong deployment of GB300, which would likely require more than 400MW. The company claims to have 1GW of compute power across its Memphis data centers, but satellite imagery taken in January reportedly showed it had cooling equipment installed capable of managing 350MW.

SpaceX's IPO prospectus from earlier this year said “the next phase of expansion at Colossus 2 will bring online at least 220,000 additional GB300 processors and over 400 additional megawatts of compute power,” presumably referring to the new data center. DCD has contacted the firm for comment on the new project.

The company’s other Memphis data center is located in another part of the city, in a former Electrolux factory on Paul Lowry Road. It is also reportedly considering building a campus in Texas.

SpaceXAI sets out timeline for removing problematic turbines

The presence of xAI’s data centers in Memphis has been a source of controversy due to the company’s use of portable natural gas turbines.

While these have enabled the company to bring data center capacity online fast, campaigners say the polluting machines have damaged air quality in some of Memphis’s poorest neighborhoods.

In April, civil rights organization the NAACP made a complaint against xAI, and its subsidiary MZX Tech, alleging that 27 methane gas turbines that power the company’s Colossus 2 data center were being run illegally, in violation of the Clean Air Act.

Now the company has said it will remove 69 turbines from the site over the next year, ahead of the installation of a permanent 1.2GW power plant for the data centers, which received permitting approval in March. The company will begin removing the temporary turbines next month, though as the permanent installation will apparently comprise 41 gas turbines, neighbors may not notice much difference.

A SpaceXAI statement said it had “entered into an agreed order with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality establishing a fixed removal timeline for all 69 of the temporary, mobile turbines.”

It added: “We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local community.”