SpaceX plans to spend more than $74 billion building two giant AI supercomputing campuses in Arizona and Texas, its biggest move yet from rocket maker to provider of the computing power behind artificial intelligence.
The company announced the plans on Thursday, in a statement reported by Reuters and Bloomberg. The larger campus, in Cochise County, Arizona, would cost about $50 billion; the second, at SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, would cost more than $24 billion.
The Arizona site would cover about 747 acres and hold up to nine computing buildings. At full build-out it could draw as much as six gigawatts of electricity — roughly the output of several large power stations. SpaceX says the project would create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent ones, and that it would use dry cooling, with no planned industrial use of groundwater.
The Texas campus, on 444 acres near the company’s Starbase headquarters, would take a different approach to power: SpaceX plans to build, own and operate its own gas-fired power plant, generating electricity on site rather than drawing from the Texas grid. The company says the project has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs and would support more than 500 permanent roles once running.
Neither campus is approved yet. The Starbase tax abatement goes before the city commission on 9 December, and Cochise County will hold a public hearing on the Arizona project the same day. A petition signed by 2,400 people has asked county officials to refuse the permit, with residents raising concerns about electricity demand and the scale of the development.
The announcement underlines how far SpaceX has moved beyond launch. Since acquiring Elon Musk’s AI company xAI in February in a $1.25 trillion all-stock deal, SpaceX has repositioned itself as an AI infrastructure provider, supplying computing power for its Grok models and for outside customers.
Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that Anthropic is SpaceX’s largest customer. Anthropic’s amended share-offering filing, published on 10 November ahead of its stock market debut, lists computing agreements with SpaceX.AI worth up to $120.5 billion, running into 2029 — although either side can cancel each agreement on 90 days’ notice once initial non-cancellable periods end in January and March 2027, so the figure is a ceiling rather than a guaranteed commitment.
Some caution is warranted on the headline number. The $74 billion figure comes from SpaceX’s own statement, as carried by Reuters and Bloomberg; no regulatory filing states it, and it is not clear whether it overlaps with earlier commitments, such as the roughly $40 billion Nvidia chip lease reported earlier this month. Until the December votes, the campuses are plans, not spending.
Sources: Reuters, reported by Voltgrid News (https://voltgridnews.com/story/spacex-plans-over-74b-for-arizona-and-texas-data-centers); Bloomberg Law (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/spacex-plans-74-billion-data-center-projects-in-arizona-texas); Bisnow (https://www.bisnow.com/news/national/data-center-development/elon-musk-spacex-unveils-74b-data-center-build-out-texas-arizona).
