Elon Musk is taking over an old Spam factory to expand his AI complex

Elon Musk is not wasting any time building out his massive artificial intelligence computing facilities in Tennessee, according to Business Insider. Musk announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he is expanding his Colossus 2 project with two additional sites dubbed Spam and Gun Range.

He said the Spam location used to house Hormel-brand products, with Spam perhaps among them, and that the Gun Range location was once owned by the local police department. Musk walked the whole Colossus 2 site around midnight and again in the morning, noting good progress by the SpaceX team and contractors.

The Gun Range site is tracking to be operational by the end of November, while the Spam location is set to follow in December. Developing and running advanced intelligence systems requires enormous amounts of compute power, which led Musk to build a supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis in 2024.

His artificial intelligence firm xAI, which was acquired by SpaceX, later expanded the project with Colossus 2 to generate more power for its Grok chatbot. These massive data centers have drawn pushback from local communities, with residents staging protests and packing public hearings to oppose the campuses.

In April, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI and its subsidiary, MZX Tech, accusing them of operating unpermitted methane gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, just 20 minutes away. A United States District Judge recently denied a motion to dismiss that lawsuit.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, AI-edited