SpaceX Commits Over $74 Billion to AI Supercomputing Campuses

SpaceX said on Thursday it plans to invest more than $74 billion in two AI supercomputing campuses, one at its Starbase rocket site in South Texas and one in Cochise County, Arizona. The company expects to spend more than $24 billion at Starbase and roughly $50 billion in Arizona, according to a company statement reported by Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

The announcement puts a single price tag on projects that had surfaced in pieces. SpaceX confirmed last week that it stands behind the 6 GW Arizona proposal, and a Starbase city notice this week showed a gas-fired power plant and a "super-compute facility" with initial phases estimated at about $24 billion. Thursday's statement is the first time SpaceX priced the Arizona site and gave a total for both.

What does the Arizona campus look like?

An SpaceX affiliate, Tombstone Resources LLC, filed the Arizona application for 747 acres along U.S. Highway 191 near the Willcox Playa. The filing describes nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each, built in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW apiece, for up to 6 GW at full build-out. Tombstone Resources also plans to buy another 348 acres from Southline Transmission to complete the campus, KJZZ reported; the facility would be SpaceX's first in Arizona.

Riley Trettel, who leads energy and supercomputer development at SpaceX, put the total investment at up to $50 billion at a community meeting. Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative would serve as retail power provider, with Arizona Electric Power Cooperative supplying wholesale power and transmission. The plan includes a 24 GWh battery system, 90 MW of gas-fired backup generation and $3.6 billion of SpaceX investment in transmission, according to Trettel.

SpaceX said working with the cooperatives could cut members' power bills by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no planned industrial groundwater use, the company said. The application estimates a one-time fill of 3 million to 5 million gallons of water and 2 million to 3 million gallons a year for sanitation, with no new well in the Willcox basin. SpaceX expects about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs.

The takeaway: a 6 GW, nine-building campus that would be SpaceX's first Arizona facility, anchored by cooperative power rather than a major utility.

Will local officials approve it?

Both projects face decisions on Dec. 9. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing in Bisbee that day, and the Starbase City Commission is due to consider a property tax abatement for the Texas facility.

Local resistance exists in Arizona. A petition with about 2,400 signatures asks officials to deny the permit, Reuters reported. In Texas, governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has pledged to freeze data center approvals, adding political risk to the Starbase plan even before the abatement vote.

How will the Texas site be powered?

The Starbase campus would generate its own electricity rather than draw from the Texas grid. A city notice this week showed a gas-fired power plant and supercomputing facility on about 444 acres. SpaceX said the Texas project has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs and would support more than 500 permanent jobs once running.

The takeaway: Starbase's on-site gas plant insulates the project from grid constraints but leaves it exposed to the state-level approval freeze its governor-elect has promised.

Where do the chips come from?

The build-out sits on top of an already large compute business. SpaceX's AI segment generated more than half of its revenue in the third quarter, Reuters said. The company has a roughly $40 billion lease financing arrangement for Nvidia chips that Goldman Sachs and Apollo have been offering to investors.

SpaceX is also designing Kessel, a custom 72-GPU Nvidia Rubin rack intended for ground and orbital data centers, according to SemiAnalysis. The two campuses are separate from Terafab, the chip plant SpaceX has proposed in Grimes County, Texas.

The takeaway: the $74 billion campus program complements, rather than replaces, SpaceX's chip leasing and its own fabrication ambitions.

The Dec. 9 hearings in Bisbee and Starbase will test whether these two counties will host what would rank among the largest privately funded computing build-outs in the country, and whether SpaceX's pricing and jobs figures can overcome organized local opposition.