SpaceX said on Thursday it plans to invest more than $74 billion in two artificial intelligence supercomputing campuses, one at its Starbase site in Texas and one in Cochise County, Arizona, in one of the largest private bets on AI computing announced this year.
The company expects to spend more than $24 billion at Starbase, near Brownsville in South Texas, and roughly $50 billion on the Arizona campus, it said in a statement. Reuters first reported the plans.
The Arizona campus would draw up to 6 gigawatts of power at full build-out, developed in four phases of about 1.5 gigawatts across nine buildings of roughly 493,000 square feet each, on 747 acres near the Willcox Playa along U.S. Highway 191. SpaceX said the site would use dry cooling with no planned industrial groundwater use, and could cut power bills for local electric cooperative members by up to 20 percent. The company estimates about 5,500 construction jobs at peak and 1,000 permanent positions.
The Starbase campus would be built on about 444 acres beside a gas-fired power plant that SpaceX would own and operate, generating its own electricity rather than drawing from the Texas grid. The facility is intended to train frontier AI systems for medical research, emergency response, advanced manufacturing and national security, and to support development of future space-based computing. Construction there is already under way, with more than 3,000 construction jobs and over 500 permanent roles expected.
The scale of the commitment reflects how far SpaceX has moved beyond rockets and satellite internet. Its AI segment generated more than half of the company's revenue in the third quarter, Reuters reported, and quarterly revenue nearly doubled to $14.575 billion in the three months to September 30, up from $7.814 billion in the prior quarter, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX went public in June.
Neither project is a done deal yet. Both face key local decisions on December 9: the Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hear the Arizona special use application, after a petition with about 2,400 signatures asked officials to deny the permit, while the Starbase City Commission is due to consider a property tax abatement for the Texas project.
