SpaceX is systematically adjusting its approach to building AI data centers, with the pace of expansion at new sites likely to slow significantly. Insiders say the company will no longer follow the previous model of "building while operating, with redundancy added later," but will instead require that backup power and cooling systems be fully in place and tested before commencing operations.

Recently, Elon Musk has redirected resources from rocket and Starlink projects to ground facility construction. Wesley Salandro has taken over the data center team from Dan Rowland; Salandro has been with SpaceX for over seven years and previously managed Falcon and Dragon production. Rowland, who was involved with Tesla Dojo and reported directly to Musk, left shortly after the transition. Infrastructure, security, procurement, and finance leaders including Jake Palmer, Logan Beach, Tiffany Wilson, and Pablo Mendoza have also departed.

The Tennessee and Mississippi sites previously rushed to install equipment, resulting in some facilities lacking complete backup power and cooling for several months. The Macrohard site relied on over 100 mobile chillers, with availability falling below the internal target of 99.9%; the Mississippi site used temporary gas turbines due to supply chain delays affecting 41 permanent units, leading to power outages that interrupted model training.

To fill staffing gaps, the company has called for engineers from the Texas Bastrop and Florida Cape Canaveral rocket and Starlink teams to rotate for six to eight weeks, with over 1,300 people signing up and more than 300 officially entering the data center site in the past month. Meanwhile, the company is beginning to reduce its reliance on temporary power and cooling, and is reinforcing existing facilities, while expansion plans for locations outside Memphis, including new sites in Texas, have been postponed.

SpaceX reported that by the end of June, approximately 1.4 GW of computing power was online, with a target of exceeding 2 GW by year-end; AI infrastructure spending in Q2 was about $15.8 billion, with AI-related revenue around $2.6 billion. Google has agreed to pay about $920 million per month for approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs at full capacity, corresponding to a production milestone on September 30; Anthropic has locked in Colossus 1 computing power for about $1.25 billion per month. The company is also establishing a turbine blade and guide blade factory in Texas, aiming to shorten the gas turbine delivery cycle by about 18 months.

From a market mechanism perspective, this is a corrective action driven by events rather than a disappearance of demand. Buyers include Google, Anthropic, and SpaceX's own training needs, while sellers are SpaceX's rocket capacity, temporary power, and GPUs being deployed to ground facilities; funding continues to flow towards Nvidia chips, gas turbines, cooling equipment, and on-site engineering, but acceptance criteria have shifted from "launch first, then add redundancy" to "ensure redundancy before billing." Beneficiaries include contracted tenants sensitive to availability and suppliers capable of delivering permanent power equipment; those under pressure include short-term capacity built on temporary units and SpaceX itself, which must solidify availability before contract milestones.

On a supplementary level, the slowdown in ground expansion runs parallel to the narrative of orbital computing power: the company still plans AI satellites and Gigasat production lines, but recent contract fulfillment relies on the available uptime of the Memphis-South Haven cluster rather than on yet-to-be mass-produced in-orbit cabinets.

Source: Public Information