Greetings,
Elon Musk built his reputation on speed at xAI’s data centers — but the team building them next looks nothing like the one that built them first.
This week, we reported that SpaceX is overhauling how it builds the data centers powering its AI ambitions, replacing longtime veterans with rocket engineers who are prioritizing reliability over raw speed. The new team is testing backup power and cooling systems before facilities go live, instead of adding them later as xAI once did.
Why it caught my eye:
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More than 300 SpaceX engineers have rotated onto the data center team since a June leadership shake-up put rocket veterans in charge.
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Early outages once forced xAI researchers to pause training runs for hours, and a construction mishap knocked some Grok models offline in Memphis last week.
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More than a dozen data center leaders have left in recent weeks, some heading to Anthropic and OpenAI—companies that now rent computing power from SpaceX.
What stands out is how much is riding on getting this balance right. Reliability is now table stakes for a company selling computing power to its own AI rivals.
Best,
Jessica Lessin
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Elon Musk is famous for his “move fast” management philosophy, which he demonstrated most starkly when he built new data centers for his AI startup in record time two years ago. But a new team of rocket engineers Musk recently installed to run his data centers is taking a very different approach.
SpaceX is changing how it builds the giant facilities that house AI servers in a way that might slow the building of new campuses, according to people familiar with the situation. The new management team is looking to install more backup systems for power and cooling, and to more thoroughly test those systems before the data centers start operating, instead of adding them later on, as the AI company was doing, two of the people said.
