Elon Musk isn’t one to mince his words when he sees inefficiency, even if it’s at companies he doesn’t down.
Elon Musk has appeared to roast Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman for bragging about the “15 million labour hours” it’s taking to build Microsoft’s new datacenter. “Already our Fairwater datacenter in Atlanta has taken over 15 million labor hours to build – even more once it’s fully finished. For comparison the Empire State building took 7 million!,” Suleyman posted on X.
“Are you sure you’re doing it right?” Musk posted in response.
Elon Musk famously only took 19 days to set up a datacenter in 2024. This pace had also drawn praise from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose team had worked with Musk to install the chips in the facility. “As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that. Elon is singular in this understanding of engineering, construction, large systems and marshalling resources. It’s unbelievable,” Jensen Huang had said on a podcast.
And while it’s not clear whether the two buildouts are directly comparable, it did seem odd that Suleyman was bragging about the “labour hours” it took to build a datacenter. It doesn’t seem like a great metric to show how big the datacenter is — it’s possible that the datacenter is massive and technically sophisticated, but it’s also possible that Microsoft is just being inefficient and taking longer to build it than it should have. It could’ve made more sense for Suleyman to describe the extent of his datacenter in a different way, such as its area, the length of wiring in it, or something else that gave a measure to a lay person of how grand it was, without talking about how long it was taking to build.
And in startups, it’s important to measure what matters. As John Doerr says in his book, finding, measuring and reporting internal metrics help push teams towards optimizing for those numbers. And like Musk hinted, a CEO being publicly happy about the massive numbers of labour hours it was taking to build a datacenter might not be the smartest business strategy.