SpaceX says it will eventually pull the plug on the unpermitted gas turbines running xAI's Colossus data centers outside Memphis — but not for roughly another year.
According to TechCrunch's Tim De Chant, the company (referred to in the coverage as SpaceXAI) announced Thursday that all 69 gas turbines currently powering the Colossus sites will be removed by July 2027. In their place, SpaceX is building a new 1.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant to feed the data centers.
The key detail is the timeline. TechCrunch's reporting emphasizes that SpaceX "won't remove all of xAI's unpermitted turbines for another year" — meaning the existing units, which TechCrunch describes as unpermitted, will keep running for many more months while the replacement plant comes online.
Some context on why this is a big number: 1.2 GW is utility-scale, roughly the output of a large conventional power station. That gives a sense of how much electricity a frontier AI training cluster now demands, and why AI companies are increasingly building their own generation rather than simply buying from the grid.
The swap also doesn't change the fuel. Both the turbines being removed and the plant replacing them run on natural gas; what changes is that a permitted, purpose-built facility takes over from an improvised fleet of turbines.
Why it matters: the AI buildout is now colliding with the slow, permit-bound world of electricity infrastructure, and this case shows how companies are racing ahead on compute first and sorting out the power — and the paperwork — afterward, with a nearby city living alongside the emissions in the meantime.