SpaceX Shakes Up Data Center Leadership After Aggressive Build-Out

Elon Musk has shaken up the SpaceX team building the company’s data centers in recent weeks, replacing several leaders with executives from SpaceX’s rocket and satellite internet businesses, people familiar with the matter said.

The data center reshuffle follows some civil engineering concerns and consistent reliability issues at SpaceXAI’s existing data center facilities in Tennessee and Mississippi, two people said. During its early AI infrastructure build-out, SpaceXAI had raced to put those data centers together quickly, leaving facilities running for months without backup cooling and power systems in place, four people said. That’s increased the risk of outages, the people said.

The latest shakeups add to the uncertainty around the timing of SpaceX’s data center expansion. Over the past few months, SpaceXAI has repeatedly pushed back its timeline to start building new data centers in areas besides its Memphis, Tenn., hub, including Texas, two people said.

Musk has lately been warning about how power shortages will prevent some data centers using AI chips. On Tuesday, speaking virtually at a G20-related gathering, he warned that a “crisis of power” will emerge by next year, amounting to at least 15 gigawatts, which prevents a significant amount of AI chips being turned on in data centers. He called on other countries to build more power to help alleviate the shortage.

SpaceX leaders who have joined the AI infrastructure team include SpaceX’s former vice president of production for the Falcon and Dragon rockets, Wesley Salandro, and the director of product support operations from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site, Logan McConnell, one person said. SpaceXAI also recently brought on an engineer from Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company, to help with civil engineering. SpaceX has been hiring for several civil engineering roles, according to job postings.

Jake Palmer, who led physical infrastructure for SpaceXAI, left the company in late July, along with several other leaders from the data center team, including Zach Wells and Pablo Mendoza, according to the people and LinkedIn data. Palmer had joined the AI unit in September 2025 from data center operator Hut 8, and Wells managed SpaceX’s data center build-out.

Mendoza served as the company’s head of finance early on, reporting to Musk’s righthand man, Jared Birchall, and then took on a director role on the infrastructure team, according to LinkedIn and an organizational chart from 2025.

SpaceXAI has lost several other leaders from its data center team over the past year. The exits include Brent Mayo, who was the manager of site builds at SpaceXAI and coordinated much of the company’s work with the city of Memphis before leaving for OpenAI. Meanwhile Liz Balke, who joined SpaceXAI from Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project, now works on the data center infrastructure team at Anthropic, LinkedIn shows.

SpaceX has touted its ability to quickly build data centers as a key competitive advantage ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering in June, and the company plans to continue spending heavily on AI infrastructure. It said it had around 1.4 gigawatts of compute capacity online as of June and expects to end the year with more than 2 GW. CEO Elon Musk has said capacity will significantly increase from there by the end of 2027.

In recent months, SpaceX has announced a series of major compute rental deals with outside companies including Anthropic and Google. Compute rental payments fueled a jump in SpaceX’s AI revenue to $2.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up from $737 million in the year-ago period.

Though the compute deals make up a sizable portion of SpaceX’s overall AI revenue, Musk has said they are flexible and SpaceX can take back capacity down the line if necessary. SpaceX in August completed its $60 billion all-stock purchase of coding startup Cursor, a deal meant to boost SpaceX’s efforts in selling its own AI products.