Elon Musk has replaced several key SpaceXAI data-centre construction leaders with rocket and Starlink executives after reliability issues at sites in Tennessee and Mississippi, according to The Information, citing people familiar with the matter. SpaceX has not confirmed the report.
The reshuffle follows civil-engineering problems at existing data-centre sites, and expansion beyond the Memphis, Tennessee hub, including planned capacity in Texas, has been delayed. During the early AI build-out, some facilities ran for months without backup cooling and power, raising the risk of outages.
SpaceX is now putting people who have already shipped Falcon, Dragon and Starlink hardware onto the infrastructure team, and hiring civil engineers around them to accelerate development.
Rocket and Starlink In
Wesley Salandro, former vice-president of production for the Falcon and Dragon rockets, has joined the AI infrastructure team, and Logan McConnell, who ran product-support operations at the Starbase launch site, is joining as well. SpaceX has also brought in a Neuralink engineer for civil work and is hiring for additional civil-engineering roles.
Salandro’s focus is production at scale, and McConnell’s is keeping flight hardware running at Starbase, which are two valuable sets of experience to get these projects off the ground. Alongside the newly hired civil-engineers, SpaceX is set to continue expanding capacity at both sites with its growing need for datacenters and compute.
Construction Leaders Out
Jake Palmer, who led physical infrastructure for SpaceXAI, left in late July after joining in September 2025. Zach Wells and Pablo Mendoza have also gone, as have Brent Mayo, who moved to OpenAI after working on site construction, and Liz Balke, who came from Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project and is now at Anthropic.
These swap overs generally point to SpaceX’s executive team holding their leaders to account for slipping deadlines. While there might be some key skills lost or timelines stretched in the shuffle, the changes will likely be for the better in the long term as SpaceX continues expansion.
Memphis Holds, Texas Slips
For now, Memphis remains the larger operating hub. New sites beyond that campus, including Texas, have slipped more than once, and the leadership change adds uncertainty to when those builds start. SpaceX will continue to focus on rapid construction and vertical integration as a competitive strength, as it plans to keep focusing its major capital investments on AI infrastructure.
That really means that speed isn’t being dropped, but obstacles in the face of deployment, whether it be red tape or simply just a lack of chips or power, are being solved slowly. SpaceX still needs to ensure its current sites are reliable and functional, and have enough spare parts and personnel to maintain them while it expands.
For now, the immediate focus will be on ensuring that Memphis has backup power and cooling, and that any civil engineering work remaining is completed quickly. This will enable SpaceX to cleanly shuffle construction and engineering resources to its next build out, without all the current uncertainty.
