Colossus data center: Memphis, Southaven, and the counts that do not match

Watch Colossus 2 go up

Nine clear Sentinel-2 passes over the same 3.3 by 3.5 km frame, from December 2024 to October 2026. The frame straddles the Tennessee and Mississippi state line, which runs just north of Stateline Road here: the warehouse near the top is in Whitehaven, Memphis, and the newer buildings to the south are in Southaven.

6 OCT 20269 / 9

Replay

Satellite pass date

20252026

What the passes show: the large warehouse near the top of the frame was already standing. By May 2025 a big pad beside it is graded; by the end of 2025 buildings and equipment stand on it; and by October 2026 long roofed buildings fill it, with more ground cleared to the west. About 2 km to the south, across the state line in Southaven, new ground is graded around an existing industrial site from May 2025, and by October 2026 it has grown into a large complex of structures. No source we have read says which of the Southaven sites that complex is.

Where is the Colossus data center?

Colossus is not one building. Colossus 1 is in South Memphis, at 3231 Paul R. Lowry Road (SELC notice, June 2025), in what Wikipedia describes as a former Electrolux appliance factory (Wikipedia). Colossus 2 began at a warehouse site in Whitehaven, about 13 km to the south-east, and has spread across the state line into Southaven, Mississippi, where the groups suing xAI say its turbines stand.

• Colossus 1, South Memphis: the first site, running since June 2024, by the NAACP's account.
• Colossus 2, Whitehaven: a warehouse and parcels bought in early 2025, with its roof branded Macrohard, as Wikipedia describes them.
• Southaven, Mississippi: a turbine plant on the former Duke Energy site on Stanton Road (Wikipedia), and two further data center sites that xAI calls Gun Range and Spam: two single-storey buildings on 55.9 acres and a single-storey warehouse on 53 acres (Data Center Dynamics).

Colossus 1: the first site

xAI began operating in South Memphis in June 2024, according to the NAACP (NAACP, June 2025). In October 2024 NVIDIA said the facility and supercomputer, 100,000 Hopper GPUs, had been built in 122 days, with 19 days from the first rack to training, and that xAI was doubling it to 200,000 (NVIDIA). xAI's own Colossus page still tells that story: 122 days to build, 92 to double (xAI).

16 SEP 202610 / 10

Replay

Satellite pass date

202420252026

From orbit, the change at Colossus 1 is in the yards rather than the building, which was already standing. The ground west and south of it, bare in the 2023 aerial photograph and grassed over by June 2024, is bare again from the 26 September 2024 pass; small structures and equipment appear along the building's north and east sides in 2025; and between 28 February and 16 September 2026, rows of large dark arrays cover the ground west of the building. The pictures do not say what they are.

The site's turbines are the most disputed thing about it. The NAACP said in June 2025 that aerial images showed 35 turbines there in March of that year; in February 2026 it said xAI had removed its unpermitted turbines and obtained permits for the remaining 15 (NAACP, February 2026). A Shelby County Health Department notice of 7 April 2026, as reproduced online, records a request to cut the permitted turbines from 15 to 12. Wikipedia reports that Anthropic agreed in May 2026 to rent essentially all of Colossus 1.

Colossus 2 and the Southaven sites

The NAACP placed xAI's second South Memphis data center in Whitehaven in June 2025, and said in February 2026 that it had begun operating in late 2025. Wikipedia describes a warehouse and parcels bought in early 2025 and a first cluster of about 110,000 GB200-class chips, roughly 210 MW, online around January 2026.

Musk has said the two newer Southaven sites, Gun Range and Spam, would be operating by the end of 2026, with about 420,000 GB300 chips between them, as Data Center Dynamics reports. On 30 July 2026 xAI's Memphis page noted an agreed order with Mississippi's environmental regulator on a fixed timeline to remove the temporary turbines in Southaven (xAI).

30 DEC 20246 OCT 2026

The Colossus build, step by step

Company, campaign and regulator statements, and our own readings of the pictures of both sites, in date order. Use the filters to see one or the other.

How many turbines does Colossus have?

The pages count different things: turbines installed, permitted, temporary or permanent, or the megawatts they could produce. These are the counts, each with what it describes.

These can all be true at once, of different yards on different days; written as one number, they contradict each other. Wikipedia reports that the temporary units are due to be removed by mid-2027 (SELC; Scientific American; Wikipedia).

The power figures, named

No average of these means anything: facility power, IT power, cooling capacity and turbine output are different quantities. A 10-metre picture cannot measure any of them. It can show where buildings, pads and equipment yards are, and when they appeared.