SpaceXAI adds two Mississippi sites to Colossus 2 data center expansion
SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk has announced the expansion of the company's Colossus 2 data center across two additional sites in Southaven, Mississippi. The sites, dubbed Gun Range and Spam, reference their former uses. Gun Range was previously a police and fire training center and will host a high-performance AI training cluster. Spam was a warehouse that stored products manufactured by Hormel Foods Corporation and will be optimized for inference workloads. Musk said the two sites will host approximately 420,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs between them.
Gun Range will feature two single-story buildings on a 55.9-acre parcel of land. Spam will repurpose a single-story warehouse situated on 53 acres. Musk posted on X that he walked the Colossus 2 site around midnight and again the following morning, noting good progress by the SpaceX team and contractors. He stated Gun Range is tracking to be operational by the end of November and Spam in December. The two new data center sites will join Colossus 2's existing Macrohard, Macroharder, and Minihard locations, which are set to host 330,000, 220,000, and 220,000 GPUs respectively. Musk said that by the end of 2026, there will be a total of around 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs deployed at Colossus 2.
SpaceXAI's main data center portfolio was originally located in Memphis, Tennessee, but has since expanded across the border into Mississippi. The company, which uses the data centers for its Grok AI chatbot, first came to Memphis in 2024, launching its Colossus supercomputer in a new data center housed in a former Electrolux factory in Memphis's Boxtown district. It purchased the site for Colossus 2 in March 2025, and the data center came online in January 2026. Despite Musk claiming it offered 1GW of capacity at launch, satellite imagery taken in January reportedly showed it had cooling equipment installed capable of managing 350MW.
A third data center was announced in January 2026 and is located in Southaven. News of this data center surfaced in March 2026 when the company filed a construction permit for a $659 million development of another building on an adjacent land parcel. Minihard was confirmed in July 2026, with construction taking place on a parcel of land on Tulane Road near the border between Tennessee and Mississippi. The expansion marks a significant scaling of SpaceXAI's compute infrastructure across the two states.
Last month, SpaceXAI revealed it had been issued a notice by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) alleging that disturbing construction activities at sites occurred prior to coverage under Mississippi's Large Construction Stormwater General Permit. The notice was issued to MZX Tech LLC, a SpaceXAI subsidiary. MDEQ is seeking civil penalties of up to $25,000 per day, with preliminary claimed exposure of approximately $6.1 million across three sites. SpaceXAI said at the time it was cooperating with MDEQ.
That same week, a judge rejected an attempt by the Department of Justice to block a lawsuit launched against the company by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP alleges that SpaceXAI violated federal law and state regulations by building and operating a gas-fired power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, without first obtaining the required permits. SpaceXAI uses turbines to power both its Colossus 1 and 2 data centers. The company used a loophole in the Clean Air Act to run as many as 35 turbines without a permit for a year, but in 2025, local regulators granted a permit to run 15 turbines until 2027. The NAACP alleges that xAI has illegally installed and is operating 57 gas turbines at its Southaven facility. In its initial court filing, the NAACP said the Colossus Gas Plant emits significant amounts of harmful pollutants, including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, which are tied to increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers in persons exposed to them.
In recent months, SpaceXAI has started renting its data centers to third parties. The company has signed major compute capacity agreements with Reflection, Anthropic, and Google. These agreements signal a shift toward offering infrastructure as a service beyond internal AI model training. The combination of rapid GPU deployment, regulatory scrutiny, and new commercial partnerships positions Colossus 2 as a focal point in the evolving landscape of large-scale AI compute infrastructure.
Source: DatacenterDynamics — summary compiled with AI assistance; facts as stated in the original.