Musk’s aerospace and defense tech conglomerate purchased $295\u00a0million worth of Tesla Megapacks, or battery energy storage systems, that SpaceXAI has been installing to help power its Colossus<\/a> data centers in the Greater Memphis area. <\/p>\n The second-quarter purchases bring SpaceX’s half-year total spending on Tesla Megapacks to $329\u00a0million.<\/p>\n Megapacks are used for business and utility-scale developments, and Tesla’s newer Megablocks are a combination of four Megapacks around one transformer.\u00a0The systems use lithium-ion or other battery cells and help data centers and utilities avoid blackouts, allowing for energy storage from all sources, including fossil fuels and renewable and intermittent sources like solar and wind.<\/p>\n Tesla is not the only company making battery energy storage systems. Top competitors, according to research by Wood Mackenzie<\/a>, include China’s Sungrow, BYD, CATL, Korea’s LG, and U.S.-based Fluence, among others.<\/p>\n At the SpaceXAI Colossus and Colossus 2 facilities in Greater Memphis, the company has also installed and used dozens of natural gas-burning turbines for power generation.<\/p>\n Emissions and noise from the turbines have led to community uproar, and helped fuel a national backlash against data center developers, with Greater Memphis residents\u00a0complaining<\/a>\u00a0of the smell, health problems, noise and air pollution. <\/p>\n The NAACP has sued SpaceXAI, which was formerly known as xAI, in a federal court in Mississippi to try to stop Musk’s company from the continued use of the turbines without pollution controls or federal permits. <\/p>\n On SpaceX’s second-quarter earnings call, Musk said the company also plans to rapidly expand its AI infrastructure and power plants. <\/p>\n “Our tentative target is to actually have 20 gigawatts of power and cooling live online by the end of next year,” he said.<\/p>\n Some projects “won’t pan out exactly on time,” he added, “but I would expect that we’d still probably have at the, at the power plant level, something close to 15 gigawatts.” <\/p>\n Last year, before it was a publicly traded company, SpaceX bought $506\u00a0million of Megapack products from Tesla, and spent another $131\u00a0million on Tesla Cybertruck vehicles, which it said were purchased at manufacturer’s suggested retail prices without discounts. <\/p>\n The Cybertruck purchases by SpaceX came as consumers’ interest in the angular steel pickups had waned, and following a myriad of safety recalls. SpaceX did not disclose any further purchases of Cybertrucks in the first half of 2026.<\/p>\n
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