SpaceX overhauls xAI data center infrastructure after reliability problems surface

SpaceX is overhauling how it builds and tests xAI’s data centers after its facilities in Tennessee and Mississippi ran for months without complete backup power and cooling systems. The result was exactly what you’d expect: outages, disrupted AI training runs, and uptime that fell below the 99.9% target the company needs to keep its biggest clients happy. Those clients include Google, which signed a deal worth $920 million per month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs. When your monthly invoice looks like a small country’s GDP, you tend to notice when the lights flicker. What went wrong The core issue was speed over stability. SpaceX had been racing to scale compute capacity, relying on makeshift power solutions like gas turbines and Tesla Megapacks instead of waiting for permanent backup infrastructure to be installed. A power outage at the Memphis facility disrupted AI training processes, which is particularly painful given how expensive and time-consuming those workloads are. The outages reportedly impacted major clients including Anthropic and Google, both of which depend on consistent uptime to run their own AI operations. SpaceX has since responded with corrective measur...