Musk adds ex-Spam warehouse and old police gun range to Colossus 2 AI complex, targeting 1.2M GPUs by year-end

A building that once stored Hormel products and a shooting range formerly owned by the local police department are the newest additions to Elon Musk's sprawling AI supercomputer campus in Memphis. Musk disclosed the expansion on October 31, saying SpaceX is converting both sites into GPU clusters for its Colossus 2 complex — with the gun range expected online by the end of November and the old Hormel warehouse in December.

Gun Range is tracking to be operational by end of November and Spam in December.— Elon Musk

Together, the two sites are planned to hold approximately 420,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs — Gun Range with around 220,000 configured for AI training, and the Spam building with roughly 200,000 optimized for inference. Combined with the existing Macrohard, Macroharder, and Minihard clusters, which Musk's building-level figures imply hold approximately 770,000 GPUs, the additions would push Colossus 2's total to around 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs by year-end, according to convergedigest.com.

The disclosure is notable not just for the scale but for what it reveals about how differently the two workloads are built. Gun Range repeats the 220,000-GPU training design used at Macroharder and Minihard, including 800 Gbps network interface cards. Spam, by contrast, uses a comparable number of GPUs for inference but with simpler networking and less than half the fiber of the training configurations, according to Musk — illustrating that raw GPU counts alone don't capture the infrastructure demands of different AI tasks.

Colossus began as a supercomputer Musk built in Memphis in 2024 under xAI, which was later acquired by SpaceX. The project expanded into Colossus 2 to generate more computing power for Grok, SpaceX's AI chatbot. The AI business, formerly branded xAI and SpaceXAI, is now called SpaceXSI. In its most recent quarterly results, SpaceXSI reported $7.560 billion in revenue, including $7.022 billion from solutions and infrastructure, and $431 million in operating profit, according to convergedigest.com.

The campus has not expanded without friction. Residents near Memphis have packed public hearings, staged protests, and launched petitions against the facilities, according to Business Insider. In April, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, alleging they were unlawfully operating unpermitted methane gas turbines to power Colossus 2 at a site in Southaven, Mississippi, less than 20 minutes away. Last week, a US District Judge denied xAI and MZX Tech's motion to dismiss that lawsuit.

The terrestrial build-out is also only one part of SpaceX's stated compute strategy. On October 26, SpaceX disclosed an approximately $40 billion master finance lease commitment with an Apollo-managed entity for NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with Apollo and Goldman Sachs leading financing commitments and anchor commitments from BlackRock-managed funds, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and KKR-advised capital accounts, according to convergedigest.com. Equipment deliveries are expected in the first half of 2027, though the announcement said definitive closing remained conditional.

Beyond that, Musk has projected that SpaceX's orbital compute deployments — AI satellites built at a planned Gigasat Factory in Bastrop, Texas — could overtake monthly terrestrial deployments around the end of 2028. That remains a forecast of deployment pace, not a statement about existing capacity.

Why it matters — The Colossus 2 expansion shows how quickly AI infrastructure is scaling — and how contentious that build-out has become for the communities hosting it, with active litigation over environmental compliance even as SpaceX races to add hundreds of thousands of GPUs.

Reported by x.com, convergedigest.com, allthings-elon.com, businessinsider.com