they bought a factory and built the world's largest AI supercomputer in it
Twelve months. 41 gas turbines. One state line crossed. Why xAI's Colossus 2 is rewriting how every big project gets pursued.
An AI company bought an old appliance plant in South Memphis. They wheeled in 35 unpermitted gas turbines. When Tennessee regulators got too close, they crossed a state line into Mississippi.
Twelve months. World’s largest AI supercomputer.
This issue is about that. And what it tells us about every project getting awarded right now.
01 · AI & TECH
“A nail gun doesn’t make a bad carpenter better.”
That was Alan Espinoza on Tuesday morning. He was opening ENR FutureTech 2026. The room was full of Top 400 CIOs.
“A nail gun doesn’t make a bad carpenter better; it just makes him make the same mistakes faster.”
Three numbers backed it up. 95% of corporate AI pilots fail. $88 billion lost a year to construction rework. 96% of construction data goes unused.
His point: don’t buy more tools. Fix the workflow first, then layer AI on top.
02 · MARKET & POLICY
A transformer takes longer to deliver than a building takes to build.
Wood Mackenzie put numbers on it this week. Lead times for substation transformers used to be 140 weeks back in 2023. They’re over 160 now. Three years for a piece of grey steel.
Why? Data centers. US capacity is going from 24 GW to 100 GW by 2030. They’ll soak up 40% of all electrical equipment demand in the country.
So if an owner asks about your project schedule, ask back about their gear. Because the gear sets the schedule. The design follows.
03 · CONSTRUCTION & DESIGN
After 144 years, Sagrada Família finally gets a roof.
On June 10, the basilica in Barcelona inaugurates its eighteenth and final spire. The Tower of Jesus Christ. 564 feet tall.
The date isn’t an accident. June 10 is exactly 100 years since Antoni Gaudí got hit by a tram and died. The church was less than a quarter built. Most of his drawings burned in the Spanish Civil War a decade later.
Everything since has been a reconstruction.
One project took 144 years. The deep dive in this issue is about a project that took 122 days. The space between those numbers is the whole conversation about what we’re doing here.
Run this on a named client before any go/no-go meeting. The output isn’t a deck. It’s the questions a competing firm won’t think to ask in the interview.
You are a pursuit strategist for an AEC firm.
Research [CLIENT ORG] over the last 24 months. Produce:
1. Three strategic priorities their leadership has stated publicly. Cite source.
2. Two recent wins or completed projects they have announced.
3. Two recent losses, delays, or public criticisms.
4. Names of decision-makers who spoke at conferences or published in the last 12 months — with what they talked about.
5. Three questions a competing firm is unlikely to ask in the interview, but should.
Use only public sources. Cite each. Flag anything you can’t confirm as “unverified.”
It pushes past the RFP and into the friction points, the unaddressed criticisms, and the small public moments that show what the client is actually working on.
A million-square-foot warehouse in Whitehaven, South Memphis used to make refrigerators.
It was bought in March 2025 for $80 million and operational by January 2026. Two months later, 41 gas turbines were running across the state line in Mississippi. Six miles of cabling carried the power back with 200,000 NVIDIA chips at the other end.
When it’s fully built out, Colossus 2 will be the largest AI training cluster on Earth. Over a gigawatt of compute. Delivered in roughly twelve months!
The lawsuits over Colossus 1 are still being filed.
How is that even possible?
Reuse the box. The site was an old Electrolux factory. No envelope to design, no curtainwall to spec, and the year of architectural conversation goes away. What’s left is industrial fit-out.
Bring your own power. The Memphis grid had eight megawatts and xAI needed two hundred. So they trucked in mobile gas turbines. The kind utilities stage after a hurricane and they ran them as a “temporary” power plant. By April 2025, drone footage showed 35 of them on site, but only 15 had permits. The Southern Environmental Law Center sued.
Cross the state line, if needed. When Tennessee tightened regulations, xAI bought a former Duke Energy plant six miles south. That site is in Mississippi and they greenlit 41 turbines there in March. The SELC and the NAACP filed formal protests, but the permits went through anyway.
Use batteries as shock absorbers. 168 Tesla Megapacks sit on site and they smooth out the gaps when grid power isn’t reliable.
A workaround stacked on a workaround stacked on a checkbook.
Who wears the consequences
The American Lung Association already gave Shelby and DeSoto Counties an “F” for ozone. That was before any of this.
The SELC says the Southaven turbines could put out 1,700+ tons of NOx a year. That would make them the largest industrial source in greater Memphis.
The speed has a cost and someone is paying it, but they didn’t get asked.
What this means for the rest of us
You aren’t competing for Colossus 3, but the playbook is leaking out.
I’m hearing the same questions in pursuits now. Can we reuse an existing shell? Can we bring our own power? Can we phase this so something is generating revenue before everything is finished?
Adaptive reuse used to be a sustainability talking point. Now it’s a procurement strategy. Behind-the-meter generation used to be niche, but now Equinix has 20 microreactors on order from Radiant. Phased commissioning isn’t optional anymore.
“We’ll deliver your beautiful purpose-built building in 36 months” is losing to “we’ll get you generating revenue in 12, then iterate.” The firms that can tell the second story without losing the engineering rigor — those are the ones winning right now.
Colossus 2 isn’t a model anyone should copy because the community costs are real and the lawsuits are real. But the velocity bar moved a long way, and it’s not moving back.
That’s why a 144-year basilica and a 12-month gigawatt cluster end up in the same newsletter. Somehow they’re now in the same industry.
Sources: Data Center Dynamics (Mar 31, 2026); Southern Environmental Law Center filings; SemiAnalysis. Verify all permit status and lawsuit timing against current filings before publishing.
What it is: AI feasibility for early-phase real estate. You draw a parcel. Set the zoning and parking. TestFit spits out thousands of buildable layouts in seconds. Multifamily, mixed-use, industrial, increasingly data centers. With unit counts, FAR, parking ratios, and rough cost takeoffs.
Where it shines: In a developer pitch. Architects pull it up live in the meeting. They show three viable schemes in fifteen minutes, with pro-forma numbers attached. Some users say they’ve won $750K in fees on projects they wouldn’t have chased otherwise. Yield numbers come within 10–15% of formal feasibility. Close enough for go/no-go.
Where it falls short: Small irregular urban lots confuse it. The output is a yield study, not a design. You still need an architect for the architecture. And Site Solver starts at around $8,000 a year and that’s a real number for a small firm.
Verdict: USE IT — IF YOU CHASE DEVELOPER WORK
Not sponsored. Free trial through their sales team. Check current pricing on testfit.io.
AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2026
San Diego Convention Center · June 10–13, 2026
About a month from now, every architect you know is going to San Diego. 350 sessions. The biggest expo in the industry. The AIA Firm Award.
If you’re in marketing or BD, the one session built for our crowd is “AI vs. Reality: Trust, Perception & Differentiation in Architectural Communication.” The Small Firm Exchange’s AI session is also worth your time. You’ll leave with a usable starter kit.
Skip a keynote if you have to but don’t skip the open studios. That’s where the real conversations happen.
Advance pricing closes June 9.
Two listings this week. Verify the apply links are still live before you click — these things move fast.
ZGF Architects · Los Angeles · On-site
ZGF doesn’t open many roles. When they do, they fill fast. If you’ve ever wanted to write proposals for a firm whose work shows up in design school lectures — this is the one.
AC Martin · Los Angeles · On-site
120 years old. Quietly behind a lot of the city’s institutional work. Good fit if you like writing about civic and education projects without the agency-style polish.
Want to list a role with us? Hit reply.
That’s Issue #4.
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- AEC Wire