One of the new buildings at the Colossus 2 campus used to store canned meat. The other used to be the local police department’s gun range. Together they will hold about 420,000 of Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips.
The Colossus 2 campus is getting two new buildings with names only Elon Musk would pick. On October 31, 2026, Musk said on X that he is adding two sites to the Colossus 2 AI campus in Tennessee, named “Spam” and “Gun Range.” Spam used to house Hormel-brand products. Gun Range was once the local police department’s gun range, as Musk put it: “It was literally the local police department’s gun range that we bought.”
Musk toured the site himself, writing: “I walked the whole Colossus 2 site around midnight and again this morning. Good progress by the SpaceX team and contractors. Gun Range is tracking to be operational by end of November and Spam in December.” The two buildings will add about 420,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to a complex Musk says will hold around 1.2 million Blackwell chips by the end of the year.
The Colossus 2 campus is the second-generation home of the AI computing cluster that Musk’s xAI built in Memphis in 2024, now part of SpaceX after xAI was acquired by the rocket company. What started as a single supercomputer has become one of the largest private AI buildouts in the world, and the names Musk gives its buildings have become a running story of their own.
In Brief
- The news: Musk is adding two sites, Spam and Gun Range, to the Colossus 2 campus in the Memphis area.
- Gun Range: about 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs configured for AI training, tracking to open by the end of November 2026.
- Spam: about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs configured for AI inference, tracking to open in December 2026.
- The total: Musk says the Colossus 2 campus will hold around 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs by year-end, a stated target, not a confirmed count.
- The history: Spam is a former Hormel warehouse in Southaven, Mississippi; Gun Range is a former police gun range.
- The friction: the buildout faces a lawsuit over gas turbines and a 135-day city pause on new data-center development.
What the Colossus 2 Campus Is Adding
Gun Range is the straightforward half of the expansion. It repeats the training design Musk described at Macroharder and Minihard: 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs with 800 Gbps network interface cards, built to train AI models. Musk says it is tracking to be operational by the end of November, which would make it the third training building of its kind at the complex.
Spam is the more interesting building. It is a former Hormel Foods distribution warehouse on Tulane Road in Southaven, Mississippi, that once stored canned meat products, and Musk has renamed it after the product it used to hold. It will house about 200,000 GB300 GPUs, but configured for inference, the work of running trained models for users, rather than training. Musk says its design needs simpler networking and less than half the fiber of a training building, which makes a converted warehouse a plausible home for it.
The split matters because it shows what the complex is for. Training buildings teach models. Inference buildings serve them. A campus with both can train Grok and then run it for users from the same site, and the balance between the two tells you where Musk thinks demand is heading. Spam’s December target would give the complex a large inference wing just as Grok’s user base keeps growing.
How the Colossus 2 Campus Reaches 1.2 Million GPUs
The headline number needs careful reading. Musk says there will be “a total of around 1.2M Blackwells at Colossus 2 by end of year,” referring to Nvidia’s Blackwell family of AI chips. The five named buildings account for about 990,000 GPUs by the published counts, and adding Gun Range and Spam to the existing 770,000 brings the calculated total to about 1.19 million, which rounds to Musk’s figure. The gap between the named buildings and the headline total is not explained in the posts, so the two figures should not be treated as the same confirmed total.
What is clear is the pace. The original Colossus was built in Memphis in 2024, and the second-generation complex has grown through a series of named buildings that Musk announces on X as they come online. Macrohard, at about 810,000 square feet, holds 330,000 GPUs, a mix of 110,000 GB200 and 220,000 GB300 units, according to Musk’s weekend clarification. Macroharder and Minihard each hold 220,000 GB300 chips. The two new buildings would add roughly 420,000 more.
The money behind the buildout is a story in itself. Musk defended the spending on X the same weekend, writing that “our capex efficiency is greatly underestimated,” in response to an estimate that SpaceX needs about $470 billion in capital spending over five quarters. He also talked up Terafab, a planned chip factory venture with TSMC, targeting a first test chip around May or June 2027 and volume production in the third quarter of 2028.
The Colossus 2 Campus and the Memphis Backlash
The expansion is not happening without pushback. In April 2026, the NAACP sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech over methane gas turbines at the Memphis site that the group says were installed without permits. Last week, a judge rejected SpaceX’s motion to dismiss the case, which means the turbine dispute will keep running alongside the construction.
The Memphis City Council has also weighed in. It rejected a proposed one-year moratorium on data-center development, but approved a 135-day pause instead, a shorter window that still slows new projects while the city works out its rules. The pause does not stop buildings already underway, but it signals that the political welcome in Memphis is cooling as the complex grows.
That tension is now part of the story of every large AI data center in the United States. The same week Musk announced the two new buildings, the national debate over data-center construction was sharpening, with only about one in three Americans approving of the fast pace of new data-center building. The Colossus 2 campus is the most visible example of that pace, and its neighbors are watching the power, water and emissions questions as closely as the GPU counts.
What to Watch Next
The first test for the Colossus 2 campus is the calendar. Gun Range is tracking to be operational by the end of November, and Spam in December. Those are Musk’s stated targets, and his timelines have slipped before, so the openings themselves will be the first real check on the weekend’s claims. A second test is power: one analysis puts facility power at about 3.2 gigawatts by the end of 2026, and Musk has said SpaceX is confident about 10 gigawatts and building toward 20 gigawatts added in 2027. Where that power comes from is the question the lawsuit and the city pause are both asking.
The third test is what the chips actually do. The Colossus 2 campus exists to train and serve Grok, and the value of 1.2 million GPUs depends on whether Grok keeps improving fast enough to justify the build. The hardware is the easy part to count. The returns are not.
Quick Answers
What is the Colossus 2 campus?
The Colossus 2 campus is SpaceX’s AI computing complex in the Memphis area, built by xAI starting in 2024 and now part of SpaceX after xAI was acquired by the rocket company. It houses the GPU clusters that train and run Grok, and it is expanding through a series of named buildings.
What are Spam and Gun Range?
Spam is a former Hormel warehouse in Southaven, Mississippi, being converted into an inference building with about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs. Gun Range is a former local police gun range being converted into a training building with about 220,000 GB300 GPUs. Both names come from what the sites used to be.
When do the new buildings open?
Musk says Gun Range is tracking to be operational by the end of November 2026 and Spam in December 2026. Those are his stated targets, not confirmed openings.
How many GPUs will Colossus 2 hold?
Musk says around 1.2 million Blackwell GPUs by the end of 2026. The five named buildings account for about 990,000 by the published counts, so the headline figure includes capacity beyond the named buildings and should be read as a target.
The Takeaway
The Colossus 2 campus keeps growing the way Musk builds everything: fast, in public, and with names that make the story impossible to ignore. Spam and Gun Range will add about 420,000 GPUs to a complex that already holds close to a million, and the inference wing at Spam shows the project is shifting from training models to serving them. But the numbers are Musk’s targets, the power bill is still contested, and the neighbors in Memphis are no longer just watching. The next two months will show whether the buildings open on schedule, and whether the city and the courts let the expansion keep running at this speed.
Sources: Business Insider, “Elon Musk Colossus 2 campus” (blocked to text fetch; built from verified alternates named below); Converge Digest, “Musk Maps Colossus 2 Expansion to 1.2M GPUs With Gun Range and Spam”; TipRanks, “Why Is SPCX Stock Rebounding in Premarket Today After Friday’s Sell-Off?” (November 2, 2026); Musk’s October 31, 2026 posts on X, as reported by the sources above. GPU counts and opening dates are Musk’s stated targets from those posts, not independently confirmed operational facts. No compute capacity, power or cost figures for Spam or Gun Range were given in the Business Insider report.
