Friday, September 4, 2026

SpaceX shakes up AI data center team after reliability woes

By Venture AtlasCorrections

SpaceX

SpaceX replaced several leaders of its AI data-center build-out in early September 2026 after reliability and civil-engineering problems surfaced at its Tennessee and Mississippi sites, which had run for months without backup cooling or power. Rocket-production executive Wesley Salandro and Starbase operations director Logan McConnell moved in to run data centers as Jake Palmer, Zach Wells and Pablo Mendoza departed, while senior Starlink executive Michael Nicolls was installed to oversee xAI; the Macrohard facility had relied on more than 100 mobile chillers and posted uptime well below SpaceX's internal 99.9% target. The reshuffle comes as SpaceX faces a September 30, 2026 deadline to deliver committed GPUs under its roughly $920 million-a-month compute deal with Google.