The Daily Dig
xAI has filed a building permit for a new structure at its growing data center campus near Memphis, Tennessee. The proposed building carries a project value of $659 million and would rise four stories to roughly 75 feet, covering approximately 312,000 square feet. Permit documents filed with the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development list the project address as 5414 Tulane Road, on a 79-acre parcel adjacent to the company's Colossus 2 data center. What the building will actually be used for has not been disclosed.
xAI came to Memphis in 2024, standing up its Colossus supercomputer inside a converted Electrolux factory in Southwest Memphis near the Boxtown district. The company picked up land for Colossus 2 in March 2025, and that facility went live in January 2026. A month before that, in December 2025, xAI purchased a third building in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line, naming it MACROHARDRR, with plans to convert it into a data center in 2026. Musk has pegged the broader campus at roughly 2 gigawatts of compute capacity when fully built out, though satellite analysis from mid-2025 put cooling infrastructure at Colossus 2 closer to 200 megawatts at that point.
Project Snapshot:
Company: xAI
Project: New building at Memphis AI data center campus
Estimated investment: $659 million
Building size: 312,000 sq ft, four stories, approx. 75 ft tall
Location: 5414 Tulane Road, Memphis, TN, 79-acre parcel adjacent to Colossus 2
Colossus 2: Land acquired March 2025; came online January 2026
Third site: MACROHARDRR, purchased December 2025 in Southaven, Mississippi; data center conversion planned for 2026
Campus target: Approx. 2GW compute capacity
Power commitment: 1.2GW power development commitment announced March 2026
Grid/infrastructure: New substations, electrical upgrades, and water recycling plant in the works, projected to protect approx. 4.7 billion gallons annually from the Memphis aquifer
Environmental: SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed a notice of intent to sue over unpermitted gas turbine use at the Colossus 2 power infrastructure in Southaven, Mississippi
TheJobWalk Thoughts
One permit does not tell the whole story here. The $659 million filing is the visible part, the building everyone can point to, but on a campus chasing 2 gigawatts of compute, the structural work is rarely where the construction volume actually lives. Power delivery, substation builds, primary electrical distribution, and water infrastructure are where the real scope stacks up on projects like this, and xAI's own track record in Memphis proves it out. Every phase of this buildout has been led by the energy and utility work, not the buildings. For contractors and suppliers watching this program, the most useful signal is not the building permit. It is the utility coordination timelines and substation filings at the county level. Those are public, they move ahead of main construction activity, and on this project they have consistently been the earliest indicator of where the next mobilization is heading.
