Thursday saw SpaceX (SPCX) shares rise amid investor consideration of a major shift in how the company constructs its data centers, alongside nearly $40 million in UK spending on SpaceX satellite services.
The biggest story came from The Information, which reports that SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk are reworking how data centers get built. A fresh group from the rocket side now runs the project, and they are putting reliability ahead of speed. That means more backup power and cooling systems are being added, with thorough testing before anything goes live.
Colossus Was Built for Speed
The shift represents a break from the approach taken by Musk and xAI with their Colossus campus in Tennessee. That AI unit launched its first data center in merely 122 days, a schedule that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described as “superhuman.”
The quick pace carried a cost. Last week, a construction-related outage at the Memphis facility took some Grok models offline, affecting compute customers such as Anthropic and Google, per The Information.
In the past few weeks, more than a dozen leaders who ran the company’s data centers have stepped down, and SpaceX engineers have taken their places to fill those roles.
After the outage, Musk wrote on X about the company being “taking corrective action to ensure this does not happen again.”, a statement made nearly every Sunday at the Memphis site where he has visited.
What the New Data Center Team Changes
More backup power, additional cooling systems, and extended testing before facilities start running are part of the new approach. That change could slow the pace of new construction, according to the report.
Reliability now outranks speed.
UK Spends Nearly $40 Million on SpaceX
While the data center buildout may slow, SpaceX’s defense business is getting a boost. Reuters reported that the UK has spent nearly $40 million on SpaceX satellite services, deepening the UK’s reliance on Musk’s company.
The ministry responsible for national defense has purchased roughly $17.6 million of Starshield services — the military-grade version of Starlink with improved encryption — along with $22.3 million of standard Starlink. The United Kingdom is deploying approximately 1,000 Starshield and 500 Starlink terminals.
Starshield vs. Starlink in the UK
| Starshield | Starlink | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Military-grade | Standard |
| Encryption | Enhanced | Standard |
| UK purchase | ~$17.6 million | ~$22.3 million |
| UK terminals | ~1,000 | ~500 |
Public confirmation that Starshield has been adopted by a nation outside the United States now rests with the United Kingdom, which has become the first such country to make that acknowledgment.
Insider Shares Hit the Market
The Thursday’s slight gains came even as SpaceX stock absorbed new share supply. About 319 million insider shares — roughly 7% of insider stock — became eligible for sale on Wednesday, the 90-day mark since SpaceX’ launch of the company’s shares on the market took place on June 12th.
In June, SpaceX went public with a price of $135 per share, raising a record $85.7 billion at a valuation of $1.77 trillion while putting only a small portion of its stock on sale — less than 5%.
The Trade-Off for Investors
The Information describes a choice investors must make: reliability over speed, which could mean slower building of new data centers.
Pras Subramanian is the lead transportation reporter for Yahoo Finance.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
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