SpaceX said on Thursday, November 12, that it plans to invest more than 74 billion dollars in two artificial intelligence supercomputing campuses, one at its Starbase site in Texas and another in Cochise County, Arizona. Reuters reported the announcement, which the company made in a statement under its Building the Future initiative. It is one of the largest private AI infrastructure plans announced this year, and it would push the rocket and satellite company much deeper into the business of owning the computing behind its own AI models.
The Texas campus carries the smaller price tag, at more than 24 billion dollars. SpaceX outlined the Starbase project earlier in the week in a public hearing notice covering a gas-fired power plant and a super-compute facility on a tract of about 444 acres inside the city limits of Starbase, east of Brownsville. The Starbase facility would generate its own electricity rather than draw from the public grid. Nothing has been approved yet there either: the Starbase City Commission is scheduled to consider a property tax abatement and a related economic development agreement for the project at a public meeting on December 9, and the notice gave no figure for the size of that abatement.
The Arizona campus, called the Cochise Supercomputer Campus, would cost roughly 50 billion dollars. The application, filed on October 30 under the name Tombstone Resources L.L.C., covers 747 acres near the Willcox Playa along U.S. Highway 191, about 80 miles east of Tucson. SpaceX confirmed its role at a town hall at Cochise Elementary School on November 4. The plan calls for up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each, built in four phases of roughly 1.5 gigawatts apiece and reaching up to 6 gigawatts at full build-out, backed by a 24 gigawatt-hour battery storage system and about 3.6 billion dollars in grid upgrades.
SpaceX projects about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs in Arizona, with more than 8,500 construction jobs and more than 1,500 permanent roles reported across both sites. The Arizona campus would use dry cooling and, the company says, no industrial groundwater. SpaceX also says it is working with local electric cooperatives and that the project could cut cooperative members' electricity bills by as much as 20 percent. That benefit is not settled: the power supplier says contract terms are still being negotiated, and the rate figures in the company's public materials differ from one document to another.
Approval is the immediate hurdle. Cochise County does not permit data centers by right, so the project needs a special use authorization, filed as case SU26-22, and the county notes that it has not independently verified or approved the application. A petition asking officials to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures. The county Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If the project clears that step, construction could begin as early as March 2027.
The plan underlines where the AI race is now decided: power generation, permitting, and financing matter as much as chip supply. Planned investment is not spent money, and SpaceX has not disclosed its accelerator suppliers, network architecture, or commissioning schedules for either campus. The December 9 decisions in Texas and Arizona will be the first real test of how much of the 74 billion dollars becomes construction.
Photo: The Starbase sign, High Bay and Mega Bay, and Starships at SpaceX's Starbase site in Texas. Photograph by Jenny Hautmann for Supercluster, via Wikimedia Commons.