Musk Says Two New SpaceXAI Data Centres Near Memphis Will Open Before Year-End

In posts on X on Saturday, October 31, Musk named the two sites "Gun Range" and "Spam" after their former uses, according to local reports. The expansion would make the Southaven and Memphis area one of the densest concentrations of AI computing anywhere, at a time when data centre growth has become a political issue in the United States and the company is fighting legal challenges over the gas turbines that power the site.

Gun Range takes its name from a former police department firing range that Musk said the company bought. He said it would be configured like the company's existing Macroharder and Minihard clusters, with about 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips used to train AI models, and that it was tracking to come online by the end of November. Spam is named after a building that Musk said once housed Hormel products. It is planned to hold about 200,000 GB300 chips for inference, the work of running trained models, which he said needs simpler networking and less than half the fibre. Musk said it is due in December.

Musk also said he had walked the entire Colossus 2 site and expected about 1.2 million Nvidia Blackwell-generation chips to be installed across the campus by the end of the year. He did not give street addresses for either new cluster, and the chip counts have not been independently verified.

The company's footprint in north DeSoto County, Mississippi, has grown quickly. In January, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said xAI would invest more than $20 billion in a data centre in Southaven. The company runs a power plant on Stanton Road whose gas turbines supply its data centres across the state line in Memphis, and through its affiliate MZX Tech LLC it has bought homes near the plant and leased a warehouse along Highway 51, DeSoto County News reported. Contractors have filed liens worth more than $220 million in the county over the project, according to the same report.

Opposition has grown alongside the build-out. On October 30, a federal judge denied the company's motion to dismiss an air pollution lawsuit brought by the NAACP and environmental groups, which argue that the turbines have operated without proper permits. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality is seeking about $6.1 million in potential penalties related to the Southaven sites, and residents near the power plant have filed a proposed class action over turbine noise. Some neighbours say the company's offers to buy their homes have been too low.

Southaven city leaders have backed the project for the investment and tax base it brings, while critics say the pace of growth has outrun oversight. Whether Gun Range meets Musk's end-of-November target will be the first test of the timetable.