After Elon Musk Bashes Sacramento Data Centers, Tesla Gets One

Last December, in a live event on Twitter, Elon Musk called Sacramento “possibly the worst place to have a data center,” complaining about the hot temperatures of California’s inland capital, where Twitter’s data centers once went down because a heat wave overwhelmed their equipment.

Musk seems to have gotten comfortable with Sacramento’s heat. Twitter stopped using its data centers in the city at the end of 2022. Since then, one of his other companies, electric vehicle maker Tesla, has signed a lease with the operator of one of the facilities—NTT Data—to occupy Twitter’s former space there, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. Tesla has also held talks with Twitter about subletting a second Sacramento data center, run by Prime Data Centers, where Twitter still has a lease even though it doesn’t use the facility, according to a different person briefed on those conversations.

If Tesla ends up taking over Twitter’s lease in the Prime data center, it wouldn’t be the first time Musk has used one of his companies to lend a helping hand to another one. But even if Tesla doesn’t do so, its agreement to lease space in the NTT data center could raise a question for Tesla shareholders of why the company is doing so given Musk’s comments that Sacramento was so inhospitable to such facilities.