SpaceX Can Land a Rocket but Couldn't Keep Its Data Centers Cool, So Musk Is Now Casting His Own Turbine Blades
About This Episode
The Information reported on September 1 that SpaceX has handed its AI data center operations to Starlink's engineering chief and pulled rocket-production executives into the unit after its Memphis-area sites ran for months without backup cooling and power, missed the internal 99.9% uptime target and interrupted model training. The shake-up follows a wave of departures, comes days after Musk confirmed SpaceX will cast its own gas turbine blades in Texas, and lands weeks before Google's $920 million-a-month compute contract starts at full rate in October.
Our Take
SpaceX built the country's biggest AI cluster at rocket speed on rented turbines and portable chillers, and the bill is arriving at once: outages, an exodus, a lawsuit from the neighbors, and a landlord who must now cast his own turbine blades before Google's meter starts running in October.
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