SpaceX Plans $50 Billion Investment in Arizona Supercomputing Campus

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On November 12, U.S. space exploration company SpaceX announced investment plans for two large-scale supercomputing campuses, proposing to invest more than $74 billion in Starbase, Texas, and Cochise County, Arizona. Of this, the Texas project plans to invest more than $24 billion to build supercomputing facilities and supporting natural gas power generation facilities; the Arizona project plans to invest approximately $50 billion to plan and build a large data center cluster and supporting power and energy storage facilities. The two investments respectively involve local land development, energy supply, and infrastructure approvals, and the Arizona project still requires county government permits.

The Arizona project is located in the Willcox area of Cochise County, with the planned site consisting of two parcels of land totaling approximately 747 acres (about 302 hectares), about 80 miles east of Tucson. According to the development application submitted by SpaceX affiliate Tombstone Resources, the campus will build up to 9 data center buildings, each with a floor area of approximately 45,800 square meters, with an overall planned computing load of up to 6 gigawatts, constructed in 4 phases of approximately 1.5 gigawatts each. If planning approval is obtained, construction is expected to begin in March 2027.

Power infrastructure is one of the main construction components of the Arizona project. SpaceX plans to invest approximately $3.6 billion in power infrastructure, of which the first-phase supporting works involve approximately $500 million to meet the power supply conditions for the first-stage data centers. The campus also plans to deploy a 24 gigawatt-hour battery energy storage system to balance power supply during fluctuations in computing load. The project is adjacent to the Apache generating station operated by Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO), which has an existing installed capacity of approximately 626 megawatts, with power sources including coal, natural gas, and photovoltaic generation. SpaceX has also proposed using dry cooling technology and does not plan to use industrial groundwater. The campus's power supply capacity still depends on the completion of grid upgrade works, and Cochise County plans to hold a review of the project's planning application on December 9.

The Texas project is located in Starbase, near the Port of Brownsville, covering approximately 444.45 acres, with plans to invest more than $24 billion to build supercomputing facilities and a natural gas power plant. Unlike the Arizona project, which relies on grid upgrades, the Starbase campus plans to generate its own power and will not draw primary operating electricity from the public grid. The related facilities will be built, owned, and operated by SpaceX, with the investment amount covering the initial construction phase of the project and possibly including subsequent expansion. The Starbase City Commission plans to review the project's related property tax abatement and economic development agreement on December 9.

SpaceX estimates that the Arizona project will create approximately 5,500 jobs during construction and provide approximately 1,000 jobs during long-term operations. The Texas project has already created more than 3,000 construction jobs and is expected to provide more than 500 long-term jobs once the facilities are operational. The construction and operation of both projects will respectively involve data center buildings, power facilities, energy storage systems, cooling equipment, and supporting infrastructure.