Elon Musk's xAI is running its Memphis supercluster on natural gas turbines, and SpaceX is designing orbital data centers powered by solar panels that will never touch American soil. The man who once promised a 'solar-electric economy' has quietly abandoned that vision for his most power-hungry operations on the ground.
The contradiction is the story. xAI needed power fast, natural gas delivered it fast, and Musk chose speed over the ideology he built a public persona around. SpaceX's orbital data center concept is real engineering work, not a press release, and the details of how they plan to beam that power or compute back down are worth reading closely.
This piece matters because it tracks the gap between Musk's stated energy philosophy and his actual infrastructure decisions across two major companies simultaneously. The original reporting connects those dots with specifics that a summary will not give you.
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