LatestInvestigationsShowsCritical ThinkingResourcesSubscribeTwo more data centers by New Year, a 13-gigawatt promise, and the question of where the power comes from.
On Halloween, Elon Musk announced that two more data centers will be added to his cluster on the Memphis-Southaven line by the end of 2026. One is called Gun Range and the other is called Spam - because Musk is a wild and crazy guy.
The announcement seemed to come out of nowhere - but it didn't. Southaven's planning board approved Gun Range's site plan in September, on the city's old police and fire training ground. The land swap that handed over that ground, and the deed for the old Hormel block where Spam goes, were both public record weeks ago. I wrote about the training ground on September 15th.
And the computing here is about to jump. SpaceX bought xAI in February, so xAI's chips, debts and filings are SpaceX's now. SpaceX reported 1.7 gigawatts of computing company-wide at the end of September, nearly all of it in Memphis and Southaven, and it's set to grow by about three quarters by New Year's. He's also promised investors 13 gigawatts across the whole company by the end of 2027. Put a pin in that number - I'll come back to it.
So, how does a project keep surprising people when its owner keeps announcing the next step himself, and the paperwork is sitting in plain sight?
Well, first let's talk about energy numbers - because for most people those numbers are probably meaningless - but they're actually the whole story.
If you've bought a lightbulb - you're probably familiar with the word "watt."
A watt measures how fast something uses energy. A bulb's wattage tells you how much power it draws while it's on. It isn't an amount of electricity stored in a tank - it's a rate, like miles per hour on a speedometer.
A phone charger pulls about 20 watts. A microwave or hair dryer on high pulls about 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt). 1 megawatt (MW) is a million watts - about 1,000 microwaves running at once. St. Jude's medical research data center in Memphis was built at 3.4 megawatts.
1 gigawatt (GW) is 1,000 megawatts - one billion watts being pulled at the same instant. For scale, TVA's Allen Combined Cycle Plant, half a mile from Colossus 1, can put out about 1.1 GW on a summer day.
MLGW President Doug McGowen told the Memphis City Council that MLGW's 2025 peak demand for the entire county - every house, hospital, school, warehouse, and business running air conditioning at once - was 3,436 MW (about 3.44 GW), and 3,102 MW (3.1 GW) so far in 2026. A normal winter peak is around 2 GW. McGowen also told the council that MLGW's substations can carry more than 6 GW across the county.
The message was that MLGW can handle more customers and is open for business.
From a phone charger to the whole county
Each square's area is its watts. They're here for scale, to show how big a gigawatt is. Keep reading and the view pulls back.
I am not saying that all of xAI's power needs to come from MLGW - because it doesn't - this is for you to understand the scale of how much power they are using.
St. Jude: its engineer of record. Allen: TVA 10-K FY2025. Peaks and wires: McGowen to the council, Oct 6th 2026.
But hold on - there's more to that claim than meets the eye. That 6 GW is what the wires and transformers can handle, not power MLGW makes. MLGW doesn't make power at all. It buys its electricity from TVA, and TVA is the one that has to have it.
And according to TVA - its reserve is thin. The board memo behind xAI's first 150 megawatts, in November 2024, says TVA plans for a 25 percent winter and 18 percent summer cushion and is "at risk of not meeting" them over the next five years.
So this past August - TVA's board created a data center rate class: anyone over 100 megawatts needs the board's approval, and new data centers pay TVA a "capacity commitment charge" of about $1.5 million per megawatt, up front, before TVA builds anything.
And when the grid is stressed - TVA cuts data centers off. McGowen told the council on September 1st that data centers had gotten fifteen curtailment orders so far in 2026 and complied with all of them, one 150-megawatt load dropping to about 5. He didn't say which customer - he didn't have to.
Here's how much grid power xAI actually has in Memphis.
TVA's board approved 150 megawatts for Colossus 1 in November 2024, and another 150 in February 2026, for 300 in all. In August the board approved "more than 100 megawatts" for a customer it will serve directly, starting "as early as November 2026." The resolution names nobody, but The Daily Memphian reported that SpaceXAI had asked TVA for direct supply.
Then there's the request still waiting.
McGowen told the council that the next data center in line wants about 300 megawatts, "again in an industrial park," but did not name who it was. Colossus 1 is in Pidgeon Industrial Park.
The request has been studied but no numbers have been released and they haven't said yes - yet. It needs the TVA board, plus a decision by the customer on whether to pay TVA about $450 million up front. So: 300 MW approved and flowing, 100-plus approved and due this month, 300 asked for and parked behind a $450 million bill. Altogether - if everything moves forward - around 700 MW.
And they asked for even more.
Back in 2025 MLGW talked with xAI about up to 1.1 gigawatts of grid power for Tulane Road. xAI never filed the final request. Its consultant proposed 1.56 gigawatts of its own generation instead, and that's when the power plant went up across the state line - the one with the gas turbines that had no air permit.
GRID POWER FOR xAI IN MEMPHIS, AND THE PLANT IT BUILT INSTEAD
TVA Board resolutions Nov 7th 2024, Feb 11th and Aug 20th 2026; McGowen to the council Sept 1st 2026; MLGW May 2025 update; MDEQ permit 0680-00119.
Tesla's Austin factory from the air. Photo: Tesla.
I remember vividly the first time I saw a new Tesla plant being built in 2022 in Austin, TX. I was on the highway driving past it with my boyfriend. I was new to the area - he was not. We were both overwhelmed with just how humongous it was - it seemed to go on forever. We were both stunned - him even more so because he could not believe how fast it had been built. Hold on to that for later.
Visualizing the two data center campuses in Memphis isn't as easy.
Colossus 1 is a converted factory down by the river in Pidgeon Industrial Park - on a road that most Memphians have never driven down.
Colossus 2 started out as one warehouse on Tulane Road in Whitehaven, and then grew into a five-building campus with its own private gas power plant - split right across the Tennessee-Mississippi line so two of the buildings sit in Memphis and three buildings plus the power plant sit in Southaven.
Even with all of the complex energy issues, Musk has been able to build 4 data centers in about two years while many other places have been passing moratoriums. And while that seemed like a pretty jaw-dropping accomplishment last week, this week things went from wild to what the fuck - because not only did Musk announce 2 more data centers - he says his computing will hit about 3 GW by New Year.
Here's Saturday's announcement, in quintessential Musk fashion, on X.
"Macroharder and Minihard both have 220k GB300s with 800 gig nics configured for training. Gun Range will have the same. Spam (used to house Hormel products) will have ~200k GB300s, but configured for inference, so much simpler networking and less than half the fiber."
About half an hour later somebody asked him for the total. "There will be a total of around 1.2M Blackwells at Colossus 2 by end of year."
Those nicknames are buildings, and Colossus 2 is the name for the whole campus they sit on. Macrohard is the big warehouse on Tulane Road in Whitehaven, the first one. And yes, the name is a jab at Microsoft.
Minihard is the smaller data center next to it.
Macroharder is the data center on Stateline Road in Southaven, at 2400 Stateline Road W.
Gun Range is the City of Southaven's old police and fire training site, handed over in a land swap in June.
Spam is the old Hormel warehouse block, a thousand feet from Macroharder.
Five buildings, one power plant, two states. His 1.2 million is the total for all five.
Running full out, that many chips could pull more than 2 gigawatts. I'll show the math in a minute.
Remember, Memphis's peak use for everything this year was 3.1 GW.
Add up every deed and lease and it's about 1,540 acres. That's more than four Overton Parks. And 189 of those acres were bought around the power plant in the last twelve months.
If you have read any of my writing about Trump - there is a huge parallel here that I want to point out. Both Musk and Trump have been telling us exactly what they are going to do for years. None of their goals or plans are a secret - they announce them all of the time.
Musk has been doing this regarding xAI for two and a half years.
So, I went back and read every post he made about Memphis, 81 of them, to see what anyone who was paying attention could have pulled from them.
June 2nd, 2024. He posts that a 100,000-chip cluster "will be online in a few months." Three days later the Chamber announces xAI. On July 9th a council member says the council "heard about it in the news."
Okay, sure. That was before anyone knew that they should be paying attention - so everyone gets a pass.
July 22nd, 2024. He posts that the Memphis Supercluster started training at "~4:20am local time" on 100,000 chips.
Memphis's record of the building's certificate of occupancy is dated the next day.
September 2nd, 2024. He posts that Colossus came online in 122 days.
The turbines running it had no air permit. The county health department issued one 303 days later.
July 22nd, 2025. He posts 230,000 chips running at Colossus 1 and the first batch at Colossus 2. That day he also posted a photo of new servers already installed at Colossus 2. Two days later Memphis issued the building's certificate of occupancy, for "office use for meeting, training and engineering."
A week later MDEQ, Mississippi's environmental agency, writes that the turbines in Southaven are "mobile" and need no air permit. A federal judge ruled on October 30th that they aren't.
September 23rd, 2025. "We will also be the first to 10GW, 100GW, 1TW."
Two weeks earlier the Memphis council had quietly pulled its only data center bill of the year. Nothing replaced it.
December 21st, 2025. He posts "MACROHARDER coming soon."
Two days later the deed for the Southaven building was recorded. Mississippi's governor announced the project 18 days after his post.
January 17th, 2026. "First Gigawatt training cluster in the world. Upgrades to 1.5GW in April."
Mississippi's governor called it the largest economic development project in state history.
March 21st, 2026. Somebody posts about a $40 billion, 10 gigawatt data center in Ohio. Musk replies that Colossus "will cost more and deliver far more computing than that this year."
Three and a half weeks later Memphis issues the permit for Minihard. It took five days. Memphis's zoning code still has no definition of a data center.
September 24th, 2026. He lists every chip by model, 550,000 at Colossus 2, and promises three more batches of 220,000 by December.
Memphis answers with a 90-day study and a 135-day pause on new data centers only. The buildings already running, and their expansions, are left out. Southaven needs nothing. It allows data centers by right.
Maybe it's not fair to look at all of this with 20/20 hindsight - but if you felt blindsided by the first data center showing up and finding out from the news - wouldn't you be keeping your eyes on Musk to make sure it didn't happen again? Cause somehow it's now happened 5 more times.
Okay - let's go back to the power story, cause this is where his numbers and the records come apart.
Let's start with what's already here.
About 1 gigawatt of computers was running on these two campuses at the end of March, by SpaceX's own filing, and the company put its total at 1.7 gigawatts company-wide by the end of September. That's the same kind of number as a lightbulb's wattage - what the chips are rated to draw, not what they actually pulled. To know the real draw I'd need the data centers' MLGW bills - and surprise! I asked MLGW for xAI's payment history in July. On October 30th it told me it has no records of it. The bills themselves are still "in process."
So - how do we get to 3 GW?
Musk says 1.2 million chips by New Year. A rack of the newest Nvidia chips holds 72 of them and pulls about 130 kilowatts. If all 1.2 million are installed in those racks and running at full load, the racks alone would draw about 2.2 gigawatts. That's my arithmetic on his number, it assumes every chip is on, and it's before the cooling. Call it the rack demand. Add Colossus 1's older chips, about 0.3 gigawatts, and both campuses together come to about 2.5.
So, how much power is xAI allowed to make here?
A data center this size can't just plug into a wall. Every gas turbine needs an air permit from the state that says how big the plant can be and how much it can burn. Add up every generation permit on file and you get about 1.5 gigawatts: the Southaven plant at 1.24 and the fifteen permanent turbines at Colossus 1 at 0.25. Then add the grid, which is a different thing - power bought from TVA through MLGW - at 0.3 flowing now, plus the 100-plus TVA has approved for November. That's about 1.9 gigawatts across both campuses, permits and grid together, counting November's supply.
Anything above that has been running on the temporary turbines, the ones on trailers, and under Mississippi's own agreement with the company every one of the 68 has a date to stop running, the last in July 2027.
So by New Year he says he'll have about 2.5 gigawatts of rack demand across both campuses, on about 1.9 gigawatts of permitted and purchased power. The gap, as far as the records show, is the temporary turbines, and they have an expiration date.
BY NEW YEAR, GIGAWATTS, BOTH CAMPUSES
Demand: 1.2M chips at 130 kW per 72, plus Colossus 1. Supply: MDEQ 0680-00119, SCHD permit, TVA resolutions. Striped: an estimate.
The Stanton Road plant on October 8th, 2026: every turbine, by model
Turbines and models: Measured AI's labels on a Vantor satellite image of October 8th, 2026, placed on this map and counted one by one. A marker means a unit was in place, not that it was running. The photo underneath is older (Vantor through Esri, November 28th, 2025), so parts of the yards still show trees or bare ground.
The Southaven plant burns natural gas, and the gas comes from one interstate pipeline, Texas Gas Transmission. The pipeline company publishes a list of every customer and how much gas each one has reserved per day, kind of like a data plan.
The industry measures gas by its heat, in units called MMBtu. MZX Tech, the xAI company that owns the plant, has three contracts on that list, and the October list shows them unchanged: 193,200 units a day. The plant's own air permit says that at full burn it uses about 325,000 units a day. Divide one by the other and the gas he has publicly reserved covers about 60 percent of the plant he built - run the plant the way its permit describes, and 193,200 a day is enough for roughly three quarters of a gigawatt of its 1.24. The public list doesn't explain how the whole plant runs; if there's another arrangement - it isn't on it.
What is on the record is construction. On October 19th MZX gave the pipeline company a 75-foot right-of-way and two new meter-station pads across the plant's own lot, and the October 8th satellite picture already shows the strip cleared.
So - the ground is being readied for more gas before any new contract shows up in public.
GAS A DAY, MMBtu: RESERVED ON THE PIPELINE vs THE PLANT AT FULL BURN
about 60 percent of the plant
roughly three quarters of a gigawatt of its 1.24
Texas Gas Transmission Index of Customers, Oct 1st 2026 (three MZX contracts); MDEQ permit 0680-00119 (13,562.7 MMBtu/hr).
Those pale rows of Tesla Megapacks between the buildings are batteries the size of shipping containers. Counts from the air put about 960 of them on the ground already, with room planned for more than a thousand others. Fully charged, the ones already built could run the plant's full output for about three hours. They smooth the swings when the chips surge, which Musk himself says happens several times a second. They don't make power - they store it.
So here's what the records show and don't show.
They don't explain how the year-end buildout runs at full load, especially once the temporary turbines have to stop. I haven't found public records that close that gap: more fuel, more permitted generation, or confirmed grid supply big enough for the load. I've checked for them every way I know how.
And I still have not gotten an answer from anyone about the safety plans for the Megapack parks.
While we're on records versus posts: xAI runs an X account for Memphis, and I also read all 77 of its posts and compared them to the records I've requested.
I counted 92 factual claims about the data centers. 23 held up. 15 were flatly contradicted by the records. 54 were the company's word with nothing to check them against.
Look - maybe my read on the numbers is wrong. I'm no expert in any of this - I've never claimed to be. But I think it does prove that some questions need to be asked.
And if anyone does start looking for the answers, there's another numbers story - one that I think is even more important - that should be added to the list.
92 CLAIMS ABOUT THE DATA CENTERS ON THE COMPANY'S MEMPHIS ACCOUNT
SpaceX doesn't just build these computers for itself. It rents them out, by the month, to other AI companies. Its biggest renter is Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, at more than a billion dollars a month. On October 26th Anthropic filed its own paperwork to go public, and in it is a list of every computing deal it has.
Its deals with Google, Amazon and Microsoft are locked in for years, "non-cancelable," their word. Its deal with Musk is up to $120.5 billion, about $3.1 billion a month from December. And after early 2027, "each agreement may be cancelled by either party upon 90 days' advance written notice." Of the four big computing deals in that filing, Musk's is the one either side can just walk away from.
Here's why that matters in Memphis.
SpaceX pays for the chips the way you'd lease a car: a lender buys them and SpaceX pays it back over years. About $20 billion of chips are on leases with a firm called Valor, whose founder sits on SpaceX's board. A new $40 billion chip lease, managed by Apollo, starts in the first half of 2027. That's the same stretch of months when Anthropic's 90-day exit opens. Anthropic can leave in three months. The chip payments run for five years.
I didn't know this next part until I read the fine print in SpaceX's quarterly report this week.
In June 2025, before SpaceX owned it, xAI borrowed $3 billion by selling bonds - IOUs to investors, due in 2030, at 12.5 percent interest, which is the rate you pay when lenders think you're a risk. Five xAI companies promised to cover the debt if xAI couldn't, and two of them are the names on our permits: CTC Property in Memphis and MZX Tech in Southaven. A promise like that means if the bond went bad, the lenders could come after what those companies own, which is the buildings and the plant here.
On March 5th, a month after buying xAI, SpaceX paid that bond off early with a $20 billion bridge loan, and ate a $518 million penalty to do it. In June it paid the bridge off with a $25 billion bond of its own, unsecured, at about 6 percent, running to 2056. Its total debt went from $22 billion at New Year to $38 billion by the end of September. The local companies don't stand behind the bond debt anymore. The borrower is the parent in California, and the parent decides where the money goes next.
So what protects the things we were promised here if the biggest customer leaves while the chip payments keep coming? I've written about this before, and the answer is nothing. Take the water recycling plant that was supposed to take Colossus 1 off the aquifer. The State set its "financial security" - the money a permit holder posts so the State can finish or clean up the job if the company walks - at zero dollars. Nothing in the plant's permit requires it to take a single gallon off the aquifer. McGowen called it "a commitment on their part, not a contractual commitment." And xAI never got a PILOT, the kind of tax deal where a company pays a set amount instead of its property taxes, so there's no deal to claw back if it leaves. The promises are still just promises.
Finally, let's talk about the 13 GW.
On its October 20th earnings call Musk said SpaceX would have about 3 gigawatts of computing by New Year and 13 by the end of 2027. That's for the whole company, not just Memphis. But it still raises the question - how much of it might end up here?
Is xAI done after they hit 3 GW?
Look at what he's holding here: 636 empty acres at Pidgeon, pre-approved for turbines and batteries, 85 newly bought acres beside the Southaven plant, and a pipeline company that just got its right-of-way across the plant's lot.
Now remember that Tesla plant in Austin, the one that seemed to go on forever and went up faster than my boyfriend could believe. That's been Musk's MO with everything. He builds faster than anyone can ask a question, and by the time somebody asks, it's done and he's posted about the next one. Memphis is still playing catch up 2.5 years later.
East of the plant, in Colonial Hills, MZX is buying them. A realtor told one resident the target is 418 homes. Seven have closed. The streets being bought sit inside the map the federal noise lawsuit draws as its class area, so every house bought is one fewer neighbor inside that map. The deeds are plain warranty deeds, no price recorded, still zoned residential, and the buyer's address on every one is 1450 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto.
The mayor says it's for staff moving in and as a goodwill gesture, with a litigation waiver he calls "obvious and sensible." But if people living there now are complaining about the noise - why the hell would employees want to live there? Not to mention that the state incentive agreements set the job minimums at 20 for the data center and 10 for the plant. Plus, no offense to my Southaven neighbors - but moving employees into houses that list for $162,000 to $205,000 - doesn't really seem like a company perk.
You don't buy 418 houses for a few hundred specialists, and nobody from Palo Alto is choosing a 1970s three-bedroom in Southaven. My bet is that that land won't stay a neighborhood.
COLONIAL HILLS: A REALTOR'S TARGET OF 418, SEVEN CLOSED, EVERY ONE INSIDE THE LAWSUIT'S MAP
The Guardian, Oct 28th 2026 (the realtor's 418); DeSoto County deeds Oct 9th to 30th (seven); Haley v. X.AI class definition.
And if that happens, my guess is he'll tweet it out months before anyone reacts.