Tesla says it will build new “1st of its kind” data centers. The automaker is hiring staff for it and snapping up some existing data centers.
The data center business is now massive with a market size of more than $250 billion.
Most of the biggest companies in the world, which are known to consumers for other products, are in it, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Meta Platforms (Facebook).
Now Tesla is getting into the data center business.
Tesla has shared a new job posting for a “Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Data Center” role first spotted by Electrek last week.
In the job posting, Tesla says that it will build “1st of its kind Data Centers”:
“This role will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of Tesla’s 1st of its kind Data Centers and will be one of the key members of the factory engineering team.”
Tesla didn’t explain how those data centers will be “1st of their kind”, which is not something you’d expect in a job posting anyway.
But interestingly, the new effort comes as Tesla has been taking over data centers from Twitter.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company stopped paying a lot of its bills, including some data centers’ bills.
At the end of last year, Twitter stopped using data centers in Sacramento. When discussing the issues regarding Twitter’s data center, Musk said that Sacramento is “possibly the worst place to have a data center” for Twitter Spaces. He especially complained about the heat.
And yet, just a few months ago, The Information reported that Tesla has taken over one of the old Twitter data centers leased from NTT Data that the social media company was using in Sacramento.
The report also mentions that Tesla is in talks with Prime Data Centers to use another data center that Twitter used to have in Sacramento.
Tesla is seeing its need for data processing increasing rapidly as it tries to take advantage of its growing fleet of millions of vehicles all equipped with cameras in order to improve the neural nets powering its self-driving effort.
The automaker is also handling a growing number of connectivity features that it tries to sell to vehicle owners through a $10-a-month “Premium Connectivity” subscription service.
On the energy side, Tesla is also handling a lot of data to operate its virtual power plant and its services to distributed energy assets, like Autobidder and Powerhub.