• SpaceX is offering employees a 20% pay bump to volunteer to help build its data centers in Memphis.
• The company is looking for "leaders" who can "remove blockers," according to emails seen by BI.
• Elon Musk said on Tuesday he often spends "four days a week" in Memphis working on SpaceX's data center buildout.

SpaceX is offering employees a pay bump to temporarily move to Memphis and help build its data centers.

Elon Musk's rocket company is giving employees a 20% pay increase if they volunteer to spend six weeks assisting its critical supercomputer buildout, according to an email seen by Business Insider.

"We now need leaders — current and emerging — to guide teams and remove blockers as we bring more supercomputers online," read the email, which was sent in early October to all SpaceX employees.

It specified that volunteers did not need to be managers already, adding that construction experience is a plus and that "drive matters most."

Employees who put themselves forward should expect to spend six weeks on-site in Memphis, Tennessee, or Southaven, Mississippi, where SpaceX is currently expanding its huge Colossus 1 and 2 data centers to meet surging demand for its compute business.

Volunteers "must be in good performance standing," with more than one year of tenure preferred, the email said. Employees who volunteer will receive a 20% premium on their base salary or on their hourly rate of pay for the period of their assignment, and be eligible for "bonuses tied to program success."

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The email described the reallocation of employees from other parts of SpaceX to assist the company's data center buildout as a "surge," a tactic employed by the company to divert employees and resources to mission-critical projects.

In 2022, CNBC reported that SpaceX offered employees pay bumps of between 10%-25% to temporarily relocate to Texas as it attempted to launch its Starship megarocket.

The company has been offering "surging" employees a 20% premium on their salary to move to Memphis since at least August, according to another email seen by Business Insider that called for "SpaceX experts and aces" to work for the next three months on the data center buildout. The email said the program is intended to end on December 31, 2026, but could be extended.

SpaceX will cover travel expenses and logistics, both emails said.

SpaceX's compute cash cow

The supercomputers in Tennessee and Mississippi, which were originally built by xAI before the startup was folded into SpaceX in February, have become a critical part of the company's business.

In SpaceX's earnings on Tuesday night, the rocket giant said AI revenue that includes leasing out its compute to other companies — including Anthropic and Google — had soared to more than $7 billion, nearly half SpaceX's entire quarterly revenue.

On the analyst call, CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceX was being "hounded relentlessly" by companies looking to rent out its compute, adding that they could have rented it out several times over.

SpaceX has been shifting executives in addition to rank-and-file employees to oversee its aggressive expansion. Business Insider previously reported that the company had placed a former Starship executive in charge of building out its compute capacity in Memphis.

Musk told investors on Tuesday he was also spending most of his time in the city as he looked to push SpaceX toward a target of bringing an extra 10 gigawatts of compute online by the end of 2027.

"I've been spending, personally, a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week," the SpaceX CEO said. He previously said he was living in an Airstream trailer on the site.

Do you work at SpaceX and have any information to share? Get in touch with this reporter at tcarter.41 on Signal or tcarter@businessinsider.com. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• President Donald Trump said data center companies should pay a "dividend" to local communities.
• In a Truth Social post, Trump said the payments could boost the controversial projects' popularity.
• Data centers have sparked widespread public backlash, worrying some investors.

President Donald Trump said that data center companies should pay local communities a "dividend" to make their projects "popular."

In a Truth Social post early Wednesday, Trump urged companies to "MAKE DEALS," but did not provide details on how much money they should return to communities or individuals where data centers are being built.

"I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck," he wrote in the post.

There's been a growing backlash against data center construction across the US, with some saying the projects are noisy, raise electricity bills, and compromise the general quality of living.

Data centers are becoming an increasingly important issue in next month's midterm elections, and some politicians have shifted how they talk about the projects in recent months. Data Center Watch, a research project run by 10a Labs, found that in the first quarter of this year, at least 75 data center projects were delayed or canceled due to local opposition.

Some companies have already started trying to placate unhappy locals with money or discounts.

This summer, Elon Musk's SpaceX offered eligible Memphis residents a 50% discount on its Starlink internet service, tied to its growing AI build-out in the city. NorthPoint Development opted for a pure cash incentive and said it would pay every household in a Pennsylvania township $10,000 if it got permission to build a data center, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.

In his Wednesday post, Trump also referenced one of his previous efforts: having tech companies cover their power costs when they build data centers to help keep local electricity prices flat.

Several tech leaders agreed to do so in March, when they signed the "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," which mandates that companies provide or pay for the power generation and electricity needed for their AI projects, among other commitments.

Trump closed his Wednesday post by saying that building data centers under his newest stipulations would be "GREAT FOR THE U.S.A."