Elon Musk told SpaceX employees that xAI will grow its data center power capacity sevenfold to 10 gigawatts by late 2027, a build-out he claims could generate $300 billion to $500 billion in annual revenue. The projection arrived while SpaceX's market capitalization had contracted by roughly $570 billion in under two months, a backdrop that makes the revenue figure read less like guidance and more like a narrative anchor.

The power math is the story

Today the Memphis and Southaven sites draw a nameplate 1.4 gigawatts. After accounting for a typical 1.2 power usage effectiveness ratio, cooling and facility overhead consume about 230 megawatts, leaving roughly 1.17 gigawatts for IT equipment. If 70 to 80 percent of that reaches accelerators, the current accelerator budget sits between 0.8 and 0.95 gigawatts, well short of the headline number.

The Rubin bet

Musk signaled the expansion will lean on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 VR200 rack-scale systems. Applying the same 1.2 PUE to the incremental 8.6 gigawatts yields a 6.88 gigawatt IT budget. At 2.3 kilowatts per Rubin GPU in Max-P configuration, that translates to between 2.09 million and 2.39 million GPUs, or 29,000 to 33,000 NVL72 racks. The source notes some systems may not run at Max-P, a caveat that widens the error bars considerably.

FLOPS that dwarf the Top 500

The projected cluster would deliver 70 to 80 exaFLOPS of native FP64 compute, 37 to 42 exaFLOPS in FP6/FP8 training, and 105 to 120 exaFLOPS in NVFP4 inference. The current Top 500 list sums to 18.73 exaFLOPS FP64; xAI alone would exceed that by 3.7 times. Whether workloads actually saturate that silicon is a separate question the disclosure does not answer.

Revenue per watt is the wildcard

Musk framed the $300 billion to $500 billion range as a simple multiplication: 10 gigawatts times $30 to $50 of value per watt per year. That metric assumes full utilization, steady pricing, and zero margin compression, assumptions that have rarely held in infrastructure cycles. The market cap drop suggests investors are already discounting the execution risk.