Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
SpaceX gives a Starship veteran until year-end to bring six compute phases online in Memphis
SpaceX has named Starship veteran Kevin Holland to run its Memphis data centers and bring up six compute phases by year-end. Managers from its rocket and satellite units now oversee capacity that Anthropic and Google have agreed to rent for a combined $2.17 billion a month.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- Holland has worked at SpaceX in two spells since 2013 and most recently was a senior director at the Cape Canaveral launch site, working on Starship.
- Wesley Salandro of the Falcon rocket division and Alexandra Noe of Starlink will report directly to Holland, according to the memo.
- The Information reported earlier that Salandro had taken over the data centers from Dan Rowland, a former Tesla engineer who held the job before the merger.
- Multiple leaders of xAI's data center team have left over the past year while launch and connectivity executives moved in, The Information reported.
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Why it matters
- exposure Musk's forecast that AI would outpace every other SpaceX revenue source by September ties the company's revenue mix to a build schedule owned by one vice president.
- contradiction Nicolls's memo sets six phases by year-end without conditions while Musk hedges the December chip batch on luck, and the reporting does not show how phases and chips relate.
- precedent After Nicolls, Salandro, Holland and Noe, the next senior opening in SpaceX's AI operation is more likely to go to a launch or Starlink manager than to an outside data center hire.
Holland's remit is the buildout of SpaceX's AI compute in Memphis [1], and every executive named in that chain of command now comes from SpaceX's rocket or satellite businesses [4][5][7]. The memo came from Michael Nicolls, the Starlink senior vice president who took the xAI president title in April [2][7]. Holland has been "VP, Supercompute" in Memphis since August, according to his LinkedIn profile [3]. The two Colossus sites, in Memphis and in Southaven, Mississippi [9], were originally built by xAI [20].
xAI lost all of its remaining cofounders in the months before Nicolls's April reorganization [7], and The Information has reported departures among its data center leaders over the past year [8]. An internal pick may partly reflect who was still there. SpaceX and Holland did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment [16], so the company has not said whether it did.
The appointment makes Holland answerable for a year-end target. Nicolls's memo said Holland would be tasked with "bringing up the next 6 phases of compute by end of year" [2]. Business Insider read the elevation of three rocket and Starlink executives as a sign of how entangled the two companies have become since they merged in February [18][17].
Filings for SpaceX's June listing showed Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month to use the Colossus sites [10]. Google said it would pay $920 million a month for compute capacity [11]. Together they come to about $26 billion a year [2]. Those deals helped SpaceX more than triple its AI revenue in the second quarter [12].
Musk posted on X last week that SpaceX aims to bring another 220,000 Nvidia chips online this week [14]. He added that a further 220,000 could follow by late December, "if we get lucky" [15]. Both batches together would be 440,000 chips [4]. Six phases between an early-September memo and 31 December work out to about one and a half a month [3]. Musk has also confirmed a third data center near the Colossus sites, called Minihard [13]. He is living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis while he oversees the buildout [19].
With xAI's original data center leadership thinned and SpaceX managers in its place [8][5], a shortfall on 31 December would fall on SpaceX's own managers, measured against a target Nicolls put in writing [2].
What to watch
- Whether SpaceX reports how many of the six compute phases are running at 31 December, and whether the second 220,000-chip batch arrives on Musk's timetable.
- An outside data center specialist hired into Holland's organisation would show whether internal staffing is policy or a stopgap after the xAI departures.
- Later SpaceX filings that show whether Anthropic's and Google's monthly payments depend on new capacity coming online.