SpaceX plans to spend more than $74 billion on two AI supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona, the company said Thursday. Roughly $50 billion would go to a campus in Cochise County, Arizona, which still needs county approval, and up to $24 billion to a facility at Starbase, Texas, that SpaceX says will generate its own power instead of drawing from the public grid.
The Arizona campus would sit on 747 acres near the Willcox Playa, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Plans call for nine single-story compute buildings of about 493,000 square feet each, built in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW apiece for 6 GW at full buildout, plus a 24 GWh battery system.
SpaceX says the Arizona site will be supplied from the grid through Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative and Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, with about 10 MW of standby natural-gas generation per compute building for outages and testing. The campus is next to the Apache Generating Station, a roughly 1 GW coal and gas plant slated to retire by 2028, and SpaceX told residents its investment could expand that station to more than 6 GW.
Key facts
- 01SpaceX plans more than $74B across two AI supercomputing campuses: about $50B in Cochise County, Arizona, and up to $24B at Starbase, Texas.
- 02The 747-acre Arizona campus would grow in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW each to 6 GW, backed by 24 GWh of battery storage.
- 03SpaceX projects about 5,500 peak construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs in Arizona, and more than 500 permanent jobs at Starbase.
- 04Cochise County's Planning and Zoning Commission and the Starbase City Commission both hold hearings on December 9.
- 05SpaceX ended Q3 with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute and targets at least 10 GW more in 2027.
Cooling runs through sealed liquid loops to fan-cooled dry coolers, with no cooling towers or evaporative spray. SpaceX puts water use at up to 10 acre-feet a year at full buildout, roughly what 20 to 30 Arizona homes use, with no new wells.
SpaceX projects about 5,500 construction jobs at peak and 1,000 permanent positions in Arizona, a one-time county sales-tax benefit of $250 million in the first year, and $34 million to $103 million in new annual property-tax revenue. At full buildout it projects payments of up to $260 million a year to Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative and up to $200 million a year to Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, subject to final negotiation, along with lower electricity bills for co-op members.
The Arizona application was originally filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC, and SpaceX's involvement became public at a November 4 town hall. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission holds a public hearing in Bisbee on December 9, with written comments due November 27; if approved, construction could start in March 2027. A petition with about 2,400 signatures asks the county to deny the permit, and SpaceX says its design accounts for the federally protected sandhill cranes that land at the playa.
At Starbase, a city hearing notice describes a gas-fired power plant and supercompute facility that SpaceX would build, own and operate on roughly 444 acres between Boca Chica Boulevard and the Port of Brownsville. The $24 billion figure covers initial phases only. SpaceX has applied to Texas regulators for air permits covering 35 mobile gas turbines producing roughly 750 MW, and the Starbase City Commission considers a property-tax abatement on December 9.
SpaceX has committed $220 million to Brownsville-area water and wastewater infrastructure, $40 million of which has already gone to the Brownsville Public Utilities Board. The projects are expected to add about 20 million gallons a day independent of the Rio Grande, with Brownsville keeping ownership of the facilities and SpaceX receiving no water rights. The Starbase build has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and SpaceX expects more than 500 permanent positions.
The Texas site sits just outside a 90-day pause on data-center applications in Brownsville, and Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has said she will block data-center approvals until the legislature passes new protections. The South Texas Environmental Justice Network has announced a protest.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”— Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO
The two campuses would add to a compute footprint centered on the Colossus site in the Memphis area. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute, targets 2.5 to 3 GW by year-end and at least 10 GW more in 2027, and said on its Q3 call it was bringing about 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month. In October it made a binding commitment to lease about $40 billion of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs and equipment, with leases starting in the first half of 2027.
Elon Musk has said terrestrial compute will be "peanuts compared to orbital compute" and that he expects monthly orbital deployments to pass ground deployments around the end of 2028.
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