Former xAI Engineer Fired After Podcast Reveals Data Center, AI Agent Details

A former engineer at Elon Musk's xAI was fired days after a podcast interview where he detailed the company's internal operations, including its data center permitting strategy and use of "AI employees." The engineer, Sulaiman Ghori, discussed the 122-day construction of the "Colossus" data center in Memphis, which used a short-term land lease and a "carnival exception" permit to expedite approval, and noted the facility has drawn EPA scrutiny. Ghori described an intense culture with Musk as a "firefighter," engineers working from a converted gym, and AI agents formally integrated into the org chart. He also revealed an internal "Macro Hard" project exploring using idle Tesla vehicles for distributed compute. The revelations follow Anthropic cutting off xAI's access to its Claude model and come amid a series of co-founder departures from the startup.