Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite says SpaceXAI’s data centers in the Mississippi city bring in “about $63 million a year to DeSoto County Schools, DeSoto County and the City of Southaven”, Action News 5 reported on 6 November. A clip of his remarks was posted on X on 11 November. SpaceXAI is the new name of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company.
Across the state line, Memphis Mayor Paul Young put SpaceXAI’s taxes at $54 million this year between the city and Shelby County, as we reported. Taken together, the two mayors’ figures come to about $117 million, and Southaven’s is about 17% higher, by our arithmetic. The two are not like-for-like: each mayor counts different governments and periods.
Business Pill · Who Pays for the Grid
A short explainer on who pays for grid upgrades for large loads such as data centers. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Southaven.
The key insight: Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite said SpaceXAI’s data centers net about $63 million a year to DeSoto County Schools, DeSoto County and the City of Southaven, Action News 5 reported on 6 November. Memphis Mayor Paul Young has put the company’s taxes at $54 million this year. By our arithmetic, the two mayors’ figures come to about $117 million.
Action News 5 reported that Musselwhite said “growing pains aside”, the development is bringing “unprecedented tax revenue”. His words on camera: “We knew it would be expanding in a campus-type format” and “It’s a good thing for Southaven”.
The station also reported that he confirmed SpaceXAI is offering to buy “more than 400 nearby homes and businesses if owners are bothered by noise or pollution”, and that the mayor said he asked the company to make the offer. In October we covered a realtor’s account of a 418-home buyout plan near the company’s gas plant.
Tax revenue from SpaceXAI as stated by each mayor: about $63 million a year to DeSoto County Schools, DeSoto County and the City of Southaven (Mayor Darren Musselwhite, Action News 5, 6 Nov) and $54 million this year to Memphis and Shelby County, $25 million of it to the city (Mayor Paul Young). The $117 million total and the $29 million county share are our arithmetic; the two figures count different governments and periods.
Six Data Centers in One Metro
The remarks came with news of two more Southaven sites on Tulane Road. Musk said they are under construction: one, called Gun Range, at the city’s former training facility, and one, called Spam, at the old Hormel building, Action News 5 reported. The station says this “will make six SpaceXAI data centers operating in the Memphis metro area”.
Three of them are in Memphis: Colossus 1, Colossus 2 and Minihard. In September, the station reported that Southaven’s Board of Aldermen approved the training-facility site, obtained through a land swap, and that the company “also provided $40 million to help build a new city training facility”.
How the Two Mayors’ Figures Compare
The Southaven figure covers the school district, the county and the city, per year. The Memphis figure covers the city and Shelby County for this year, $25 million of it to the city, Young said on 5 October, Local 24 reported. Neither mayor, in the remarks as reported, cited the tax records behind his total or broke it out into property tax, fees in lieu of tax or other levies.
For scale, in January Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced that xAI “will invest $20 billion in a Southaven facility”, and officials said the company is using “the state’s standard data center incentives”, Nexstar reported.
The Structural Read
As we read it, the Southaven figure arrives as the company adds two more sites there, and it is a mayor’s estimate rather than a published tax ledger.
As we read the two totals, they measure different things: Southaven’s counts the school district, the county and the city per year, Memphis’s counts the city and Shelby County this year, so the $117 million is a sum of two estimates, not one audited figure.
Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite, Action News 5, 6 November 2026
“It nets about $63 million a year to DeSoto County Schools, DeSoto County and the City of Southaven”
Three Implications
FOR SOUTHAVEN The mayor said SpaceXAI is offering to buy more than 400 nearby homes and businesses if owners are bothered by noise or pollution, Action News 5 reported.
FOR SPACEXAI Two more sites, Gun Range and Spam, are under construction on Tulane Road, which Action News 5 says will make six data centers in the Memphis metro area.
FOR THE REGION By our arithmetic, the two mayors’ figures total about $117 million, with Southaven’s about 17% above Memphis’s.
The framework argues: “The structural bottleneck isn’t computing, it’s electrons.”
As we read it, Southaven shows the local ledger of that build-out: the mayor counts about $63 million a year for schools, the county and the city, while the company offers to buy out neighbours bothered by noise or pollution. The framework predates this story and does not discuss Southaven.
What Is Not Established
We have not seen DeSoto County or Southaven tax records that add up to $63 million, and in the remarks as reported the mayor did not say how the figure splits between the schools, the county and the city, or which sites it covers. We did not contact the city, the county or SpaceXAI for this piece. The $117 million total adds two mayors’ own estimates with different bases.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
The Great Convergence of Capital, Power, and Geopolitics
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a supply story, and last week as a credit story. This week it was priced as a permission story, and the answer arrived as a cost, not a ban.
Southaven’s mayor says SpaceXAI’s data centers net about $63 million a year to local schools, the county and the city, as two more sites rise on Tulane Road. With the Memphis mayor’s $54 million, the two cities’ leaders put the company’s local tax take at about $117 million, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. The mayor’s remarks are as Action News 5 reported and broadcast them on 6 November; we checked the quoted line against the clip Fireside Alpha posted on X. The Memphis figures are from our earlier piece, which cites the mayor’s own remarks. The combined total and the percentage difference are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
