HAWTHORNE, Calif. — SpaceX is expanding its Colossus 2 artificial-intelligence campus with two new compute clusters that carry some of the most unusual names in the data-center world: "Gun Range" and "Spam." Elon Musk detailed both builds over the weekend, framing them as the next step in a buildout he says will reach roughly 1.2 million Nvidia Blackwell chips before the end of the year.
Two New Clusters, Two Jobs
Gun Range is a training cluster packed with about 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips, wired with 800-gigabit networking to match the campus's existing Macroharder and Minihard builds. Musk said the cluster is "tracking to be operational by end of November," and explained that its name is entirely literal — it sits on land that once held "the local police department's gun range that we bought."
Spam, by contrast, is tuned for inference rather than training. Housed in a former Hormel building, it holds roughly 200,000 GB300 chips and, because inference needs simpler networking, requires less than half the fiber of the training clusters. Musk expects it online in December and joked, "I hope Spam doesn't produce too much spam!" The pairing reflects a deliberate split: train the next Grok models on the high-bandwidth clusters, then serve them at scale on the leaner inference hardware. The additions build on earlier work, after the company brought Colossus 2 online and doubled its training compute earlier this month.
Funding the Compute Race
Standing up hundreds of thousands of top-tier GPUs is capital-intensive, and SpaceX has moved aggressively to secure the hardware, reportedly lining up about $40 billion in GPU financing. Wall Street has read that as a firm signal of intent; analysts recently lifted their $SPCX targets as an Apollo-backed lease firmed up the compute bet. Musk said he walked the construction site around midnight and again the next morning, praising the pace set by SpaceX teams and contractors.
