• 2 min read
Musk quietly bought APR Energy for AI power
Corporate filings show Elon Musk’s entities bought APR Energy in May, in a deal Electrek estimates at about $1 billion.
Image: ITzine
Elon Musk has quietly added another company to his empire this year, and this one sits awkwardly beside his long-running criticism of fossil fuels. According to corporate documents cited by the source, Musk-linked entities bought APR Energy in May. Electrek estimates the deal at roughly $1 billion.
APR Energy makes mobile gas and diesel turbines mounted on trailers and designed for rapid deployment where the grid cannot deliver enough power. That makes them an unusually practical fit for the current data center buildout, especially for xAI and potentially SpaceX facilities. In the US, connecting a large data center to the grid can take several years, while operators want clusters with tens of thousands of GPUs running immediately.
The pressure is growing fast. Estimates from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggest data centers could consume up to 12% of all US electricity by 2028, up from about 4.4% in 2023.
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The acquisition also fits xAI’s current problems in Mississippi. The company is already facing a lawsuit over mobile turbines at a site in Southaven, where environmental groups say it is violating the Clean Air Act. After the suit was filed, US media reported that the number of such units at the site increased. At the same time, the US Department of Justice is seeking dismissal of the lawsuit, arguing that the military has an interest in access to Grok.
A decade ago, Musk called continued fossil fuel burning “the dumbest experiment in history.” Now his companies are looking for fast ways to secure energy for AI infrastructure. He is far from alone:
- Microsoft is backing the restart of a unit at Three Mile Island
- Google has signed a small modular reactor agreement with Kairos Power
- Amazon is betting on nuclear generation for data centers
The difference is speed. Gas turbines can be delivered to a site on wheels. For xAI, that matters now. Its Colossus supercomputer in Memphis launched as a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, and the buildout appears set to continue. As more of these sites come online, the bottleneck looks less like chips and more like electricity.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via ITzine
