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SpaceX Can Land a Rocket but Couldn't Keep Its Data Centers Cool, So Musk Is Now Casting His Own Turbine Blades · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the rocket lands and the servers don't. The Information reported on Tuesday that SpaceX has handed its AI data centers to a senior Starlink executive and pulled rocket-production leaders into the unit, after its Memphis-area sites ran for months without backup power or cooling.
• 0:18
  [Guest] Some of those sites missed SpaceX's own uptime target of ninety-nine point nine percent, and the outages interrupted the model training its tenants are paying for. That is the product, and the product kept switching off.
• 0:31
  [Host] We covered this back in June, when SpaceX was signing tenants for Memphis faster than anyone else could build, Google included, and speed was the entire pitch. What was the speed actually made of?
• 0:42
  [Guest] Rented parts. The newest site ran on mobile gas turbines, Tesla's big battery packs, and more than a hundred portable chillers, the kind you tow in on a trailer. SpaceX says it brought the clusters online for about a quarter of what the industry usually spends, and that is why some buildings had nothing to fall back on when a unit failed.
• 1:04
  [Host] So the discount was the missing safety net. Who walked?
• 1:07
  [Guest] Jake Palmer, who ran the physical infrastructure, left in the middle of the summer, and several other data center leaders followed. One landed at OpenAI and another at Anthropic, which is to say at a rival and at a tenant.
• 1:21
  [Host] And the replacements are rocket people.
• 1:24
  [Guest] The vice president who ran production for the Falcon and Dragon lines, and the man who ran product support at the Texas launch site. Musk is treating a data center like a launch pad that keeps aborting.
• 1:36
  [Host] And there is a clock on all of this.
• 1:40
  [Guest] Google's contract. SpaceX's own filing put the full rate at nine hundred twenty million dollars a month, starting next month. That rent is riding on buildings that were tripping over portable chillers this summer.
• 1:51
  [Host] Then over the weekend Musk said he is going to make turbine parts himself. What does a rocket company know about turbine blades?
• 1:59
  [Guest] More than you would think, since the pump inside a rocket engine is a turbine. He confirmed on X that SpaceX is building a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to cast the blades and vanes, and said doing it in-house can bring gas turbines online up to eighteen months sooner.
• 2:17
  [Host] Why the blades? I would have guessed the whole turbine was the shortage.
• 2:21
  [Guest] Musk's own argument is that the rest of a turbine can be had long before the blades, so the casting is the choke point. He also said gas has to carry his AI buildout until solar catches up, which means turbines stay in the plan for years, and so do the neighbors.
• 2:39
  [Host] Who is actually living next to the temporary turbines?
• 2:42
  [Guest] Jason Haley, who can see the wall of the newest site in Southaven, Mississippi, from his backyard. His meter outside reads in the seventies in decibels, and he told a public radio reporter that people call it white noise, and it is not, it is a feeling. He is a named plaintiff in a class action.
• 3:02
  [Host] How many turbines are we talking about?
• 3:04
  [Guest] Sixty-nine temporary ones at that site. The company said Monday it has started switching them off, and the rest go by next summer under an order it signed with the state, as a permanent plant comes online.
• 3:17
  [Host] So the turbines the neighbors are suing over are the same ones that ran without backup.
• 3:23
  [Guest] Same equipment, two failures. Loud for the people outside the fence and unreliable for the people inside it, and speed is what both groups paid for.
• 3:32
  [Host] If my power company dropped service for months, someone would answer for it. Does a landlord whose building loses power still collect the rent?
• 3:40
  [Guest] A utility that drops service answers to a commission. A compute landlord answers to a contract nobody outside has read, signed by tenants with nowhere else to go.
• 3:50
  [Host] So what is the real shortage now? A year ago everyone said chips.
• 3:54
  [Guest] Watch where Musk spends. Chips he can buy, and megawatts he is making with rented turbines, so now he is casting metal, because the shortage moved down another layer to the one thing you cannot rent. Every time a layer goes abundant, the demand piles onto the scarcest thing underneath it.
• 4:12
  [Host] The same Tuesday the report came out, Musk told a G20 summit by video that SpaceX brings AI compute online better than anyone else. Is he wrong?
• 4:22
  [Guest] He is right, and so is the report. Nobody else has stood up this much compute this fast, and nobody has done it on equipment that was only meant to be temporary, so the gatekeeper is now racing his own deadline while the neighbors count decibels.
• 4:38
  [Host] Where does this land for someone whose only stake is a power bill and a night's sleep?
• 4:44
  [Guest] Next to a resource that is useless to them. Patrick Deglon's Unscarcity calls that the Venezuela Paradox, a country queuing for food on top of the largest oil reserves on earth, because the failure is in delivery, not supply.
• 4:57
  [Host] And tonight's version of it?
• 4:59
  [Guest] More literal than the book's, but the supply was a warehouse of chips, and the delivery was a trailer of chillers. For more on compute landlords and the energy under AI, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.