SpaceX built its first Colossus data center for xAI in 122 days, a fraction of the years a hyperscaler normally takes.
Grace Kay, who covers Elon Musk for The Information, reports that SpaceX is now deliberately giving up some of that speed — building backup power and cooling into new sites from the start instead of adding them later.
"The people calling the shots are definitely put in place by Elon Musk."
Kay has broken multiple exclusives on Musk's companies this year and is the reporter behind this story.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it.
Here are the 3 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Grace Kay, Elon Musk reporter at The Information
🎙️ Host: Akash Pasricha, who anchors TITV, The Information's live weekday news show
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on YouTube (The Information)
🔴 YouTube | ⏱️ 5 min
Key Takeaways
SpaceX is building redundant power and cooling into its data centers from day one, instead of adding them later
Kay said Colossus one, xAI's first data center, "went up in 122 days" — a build speed data centers normally take years to hit
The people running the new approach are rocket engineers, not data center veterans
The VP now in charge led SpaceX's Falcon and Dragon production lines, work Kay called "very different than data centers"
More than 1,300 SpaceX employees volunteered to help build data centers when the company circulated an internal petition
A major outage hit one of the data centers within weeks of the new leadership team taking over
Kay said that timing is "not a great sign" for how smoothly the changes are landing
1. Reliability Over Speed
Pasricha asked what's actually changing in how SpaceX builds data centers for xAI.
The company is front-loading redundancy instead of retrofitting it. Kay said SpaceX is "building in more redundancies early on" — specifically backup cooling and power systems — rather than adding them after a site is already running
It's also cutting back on the temporary infrastructure that let it move so fast the first time. Kay said SpaceX plans to use "less temporary systems like turbines, temporary cooling systems" when it launches new sites going forward
The stated reason is reliability, but Kay sees a second motive. She said SpaceX is "getting involved in every facet of" xAI, and that the shift also amounts to "putting the SpaceX brand on xAI now"
2. Rocket Engineers Take Over
Kay described who is actually driving the new approach, and where they came from.
Every decision-maker on this effort was installed by Musk himself. "The people calling the shots are definitely put in place by Elon Musk," Kay said
The VP now leading it built rockets, not data centers. Kay described him as "VP of production from SpaceX, who led production for the Falcon and the Dragon...is in charge of the effort," and separately noted that background is "very different than data centers"
The team was built through an internal call for volunteers. SpaceX circulated a petition asking employees if they wanted to help with data centers, and "more than 1300 people offered" — several hundred have since joined
Kay flagged the experience gap directly. Many of the leaders now running the project, she said, "don't necessarily have" data center backgrounds
3. Trade-Off And A Warning Sign
Pasricha pushed on whether slowing down is worth it, and whether it's working so far.
Colossus one is the benchmark the new approach is being measured against. "Colossus one went up in 122 days," Kay said — a pace she called unusually fast for an industry that "usually takes a few years" to build at that scale
She expects SpaceX to stay faster than rival hyperscalers, just not as fast as before. Kay said the company will "still have really ambitious timelines" and continue moving faster than competitors, but not matching its own earlier pace now that it's adding these measures
Reliability matters commercially, since xAI's customers include Google and Anthropic — but Kay said slower builds also cost SpaceX money the longer a data center takes to come online
The clearest sign the transition hasn't been smooth: an outage. Weeks after the new leadership team took over and began reviewing older sites for redesign, one of the data centers suffered a major outage — which Kay said is "not a great sign" that the changes are working yet, and evidence the shift "caused a little bit of instability in the company"
Bonus Insights
Both of xAI's Colossus data centers are already built. Pasricha confirmed Colossus one and a second site are complete before Kay's report on the new, slower approach applies to what comes next
Pasricha named the data center industry's running joke before Kay did. He called reliability problems "the open secret" of the sector, and Kay's reply — smiling, per the show — was that SpaceX coming in "for reliability concerns" is one read of events, and putting "the SpaceX brand on xAI" is another
Kay's bottom line is that SpaceX is trading away some of the speed that made Colossus famous in exchange for reliability its rocket-engineer leadership has not yet proven it can deliver smoothly.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
SpaceX (Building the data centers at the center of the story, under new leadership installed by Elon Musk)
xAI (The AI company whose Colossus data centers SpaceX now builds and, increasingly, brands)
Google and Anthropic (Named by Kay as customers whose presence raises the stakes on data center reliability)
The Information (Kay's employer, and publisher of the exclusive reporting behind this segment)
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