Elon Musk’s SpaceX has pledged to spend more than $2.8 billion in recent months to buy gas turbines to power data centers for its artificial intelligence unit, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
The relatively immense investment shows Musk continuing to enhance spending on gas turbines even after SpaceX’s employ of them prompted public complaints, a lawsuit and regulatory inquiries over whether the company could pollute the air with carbon dioxide emissions and evade environmental requirements.
Electricity shortages are a major drag on an otherwise explosive data center boom across the United States. Portable gas turbines – generators that can operate without drawing power from the grid – were seen as a quick and fleeting solution until more reliable energy sources became available.
In addition to launching rockets and selling satellite Internet, SpaceX also owns Musk’s xAI unit, which develops Grok. To support its chatbot and other artificial intelligence efforts, xAI operates a pair of data centers known as Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, and Colossus 2 in Southaven, Mississippi. SpaceX is leasing access to some of its Colossus data center servers for $15 billion a year to Anthropic, an AI startup that is developing the Claude chatbot. Musk said Wednesday that SpaceX plans to sign additional contracts.
The novel details about SpaceX’s energy spending are part of a wave of disclosures included in the company’s initial public offering prospectus, long document designed to assist potential investors understand the company’s financial health and long-term risks. SpaceX plans to debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming weeks.
In March, SpaceX agreed to buy $805 million worth of turbines from an unnamed company through 2029, according to an IPO filing. Then, in tardy April, Musk’s company struck a $2 billion deal for mobile gas turbines and related products from an unnamed supplier. This deal is still not concluded.
Last week, WIRED reported that 19 novel portable turbines had been added to Colossus 2 over the past two months, bringing the total to 46 units. Portable turbines can be operated without a tidy air permit for a year, a rule SpaceX has used to its advantage. Some of the turbines were added after the NAACP and other interest groups sued xAI, alleging that the company operated 27 gas turbines without proper permits, posing public health and climate risks.
As of March, SpaceX had enough servers between its two data centers to employ about 1 gigawatt of power, or about the amount of electricity used by a immense U.S. city. However, the company expects further development, which will enhance its energy demand. Wednesday’s filing shows more than $14 billion worth of construction work is underway at SpaceX, including the value of data center equipment that is not yet operational.