xAI data centers: 5 sites mapped

xAI is the artificial intelligence company Elon Musk founded in 2023; its flagship product is Grok, a chatbot built into the social platform X. It builds its own giant training clusters, mostly in and around Memphis, Tennessee. It announced the first, which became Colossus 1, in Memphis in June 2024, and in March 2025 it said it would build a second data center, Colossus 2, on Tulane Road in the Whitehaven neighborhood. The research group Epoch AI now lists the chips at Colossus 2 as owned by SpaceXAI and estimates the site draws about 946MW of IT power, rising to about 1,531MW by early 2027.

The company has also spread across the state line. In January 2026 Mississippi's governor announced a third data center, called MACROHARDRR, in a warehouse xAI bought in Southaven, as an investment of more than $20 billion, the largest in the state's history; Musk said it would push his Colossus training compute to about 2 gigawatts. On July 29, 2026 Musk said xAI was building a fourth, Minihard, next to Colossus 2 and the Macro-harder site on Tulane Road, with the same 220,000 GB300 chips in a denser layout. Away from Memphis, xAI and X share a cluster of about 12,448 Nvidia GPUs and $700 million of equipment inside a data center in Atlanta, financed through Develop Fulton.

Power is the fight at every Memphis site. xAI ran gas turbines at Colossus 1 without permits until mid-2025, removing them after the law center sent a notice of intent to sue; the Shelby County Health Department then permitted 15, and in December 2025 the local air board dismissed an appeal of that permit 6 to 1 as moot. To run Colossus 2 quickly, xAI installed turbines at the former Duke Energy plant on Stanton Road in Southaven. On April 14, 2026 the NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech in federal district court in northern Mississippi, saying 27 turbines were running there without an air permit, and in May it asked for a preliminary injunction after the count rose to 33. Mississippi's environmental regulator approved a permanent plant of 41 turbines in March 2026. Residents have also filed a class action over turbine noise.

In July 2026 SpaceXAI said it would remove all 69 turbines at the Stanton Road site between August 2026 and July 2027 and replace them with a permanent 1.2-gigawatt plant, under state rules that bar new turbines after July 15. The law center said the company had added nine turbines that month. Meanwhile Colossus 1 has a new tenant: in May 2026 Anthropic said it would use all of that data center's capacity, more than 300MW. Mississippi's Department of Environmental Quality oversees that removal, with a retirement date set for each turbine and legal action possible for non-compliance.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.