Elon Musk acquired APR Energy, a gas turbine company

Primarily to power xAI’s Colossus and Colossus 2 supercomputers (for Grok)

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

A few days ago, I came across an interesting story that didn’t receive much attention. Elon Musk had quietly acquired APR Energy, a Jacksonville company that builds mobile gas- and diesel-powered power plants. The deal, reportedly worth more than $1 billion, surfaced through a routine FTC filing.

There was no press release, public announcement, or celebratory post from Elon Musk…

I’ve followed Musk’s companies for years, and the acquisition feels like a surprising, even contradictory, move. It says a lot about just how much electricity AI now requires, while also raising an obvious question: what does a move like this mean for Musk’s long-standing vision of a future powered by clean energy?

The transaction involved New APR Energy LLC, the entity that owns APR Energy’s operating assets. One clue to the deal’s size came from a minority shareholder, whose disclosure showed that a 5% stake sold for about $50.4 million, implying a valuation of just over $1 billion. The FTC filing from mid-May 2026 listed Elon Musk himself as the buyer.

APR Energy operates in a very different space from traditional utility companies. Rather than building permanent power plants that take years to complete, it specializes in mobile gas turbines and engine-based generators that can be moved to a location and brought online quickly.

With a fleet exceeding 1 GW of capacity, the company offers a way to meet urgent power demands without waiting years for new grid connections to be built.

At the heart of Musk’s acquisition of APR Energy is one of the fastest-growing challenges in AI: power.

xAI’s Colossus supercomputer clusters near Memphis, Tennessee (with supporting facilities across the border in Southaven, Mississippi) consume enormous amounts of electricity. These systems serve as the primary infrastructure for training and running Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot.

Colossus 1, the original cluster, became operational in mid-2024 after being built in a record 122 days inside a former Electrolux appliance factory. It launched with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and was later expanded to 200,000 GPUs.

Colossus 2, the next major phase, represents a significant leap in scale. Designed as a gigawatt-class facility, it incorporates hundreds of thousands of newer GPUs (primarily Blackwell-series GB200/GB300) to train more advanced Grok models.

This is where the acquisition ties in directly. Colossus 2 relies heavily on on-site natural gas turbines for rapid, behind-the-meter power. By acquiring APR Energy, Musk has given xAI (and potentially other companies in his ecosystem) a captive supply of these turbines, reducing reliance on third-party rentals.

Colossus 2 is powered in part by Titan 350. Manufactured by Solar Turbines, a subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., the Titan 350 is one of the largest models in Solar’s Titan product line and is designed specifically for industrial power generation. Depending on operating conditions and configuration, each unit can produce roughly 35–38 MW of electricity.

For an AI data center of this scale, generating power is only part of the challenge. Large language models are trained across thousands of interconnected GPUs running for weeks or months at a time. Even brief power disruptions or voltage instability can interrupt workloads, force expensive restarts, and waste enormous amounts of computational time. To help stabilize the system, Colossus 2 reportedly uses more than 150 Tesla Megapack battery systems as an energy buffer. These batteries can smooth out fluctuations, handle short-term spikes in demand, and provide backup power during transitions between energy sources.

Backing up all these operations is APR Energy’s mobile fleet.

APR Energy’s business model is to take turbines (like General Electric LM2500+, Mitsubishi FT8, and Titan 130) and package them into mobile, trailer-mounted power modules. GE LM2500 is, in fact, APR Energy’s flagship mobile solution. It directly competes with the Titan 350, delivering a comparable 30 to 37 MW of fast-track power per unit.

Elon Musk now effectively owns and controls the entire APR Energy turbine fleet. In many ways, he has bought an insurance policy against local power grid delays and interconnection bottlenecks.

The exact size of the fleet has not been disclosed. But, by late 2024, APR Energy’s fleet consisted of roughly 30 mobile gas turbines with a combined capacity of around 850 MW. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had expanded beyond 1.1 GW of generation capacity after adding eight additional turbines.

These units emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and other pollutants. Year after year, they will release thousands of tons of those pollutants, disproportionately affecting nearby predominantly Black communities in South Memphis and Southaven, areas already burdened with higher rates of lung disease and cancer risk.

I think it’s worth noting that the Colossus facility is located a mere two miles from Boxtown, an overwhelmingly Black community with a 99% African American population.

Also that the Colossus 2 facility is located in Whitehaven, a predominantly Black neighborhood. The surrounding communities along Tulane Road have also historically been home to large African American populations.

Musk has spent years positioning himself as a champion of a cleaner, sustainable energy future. Yet his aggressive pursuit of AI dominance is forcing him to compromise (or at least temporarily abandon) those very environmental principles..

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