SpaceX Eyes $74B AI Campus Build in Texas and Arizona

SpaceX unveiled plans Thursday to spend over $74 billion building two AI supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona. More than $24 billion is earmarked for Texas and roughly $50 billion for Arizona. None of it is spent yet — these are planned figures, and both the energy supply and the permits are still up in the air.

Work is already underway on the roughly 444-acre Starbase site. Local media confirm crews are on the ground and permit records show land grading was approved, but neither the proposed supercomputer facility nor its gas power plant is operating. SpaceX says the plant will generate electricity without leaning on the public grid. On December 9, the Starbase City Commission holds a public hearing on SpaceX's property tax exemption request and the related development agreement — a hearing that won't decide final approval. SpaceX claims the Texas project has created over 3,000 jobs, a number nobody has verified, with more than 500 permanent roles expected once operations begin.

The land itself took a detour. Brownsville stripped the parcel from its city limits before Starbase annexed it, putting it outside Brownsville's data center moratorium. City officials said residents should trust that their concerns about data center development, water resources, energy consumption and responsible growth are being taken seriously.

In Arizona, SpaceX is still waiting on the county. Cochise County records show Tombstone Resources L.L.C. applied to develop about 747 acres, with up to nine computing buildings rolled out in four phases and an estimated six gigawatts needed at full capacity — figures county officials have not independently verified. A December 9 public hearing is set. SpaceX projects 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent positions, promises dry cooling with no planned industrial groundwater use, and claims the campus could cut electricity bills for local cooperative members by up to 20%. Those benefits are also unverified. Reuters reports a 2,400-signature petition urging county officials to reject the permit.

The money math elsewhere is separate. A company SEC filing puts third-quarter Super Intelligence revenue at $7.56 billion, or 51.9% of a $14.575 billion total — reported revenue, not campus spending. SpaceX also announced a roughly $40 billion lease-financing commitment for AI chips known as GPUs, covering computing equipment rather than another campus, so it does not stack onto the $74 billion.

Industry forecasters see the tab climbing. Gartner expects AI infrastructure spending to hit $2.397 trillion in 2027, or 59% of global AI expenditure, with AI-optimized server spending at $957.2 billion in 2027 compared with $527.6 billion in 2026. Gartner's John-David Lovelock credited faster-than-expected expansion of user requirements into scaling up inference workloads alongside increasingly compute-intensive training workloads. PwC estimates $31.6 trillion in global data-center capital expenditure through 2050, including $3.2 trillion for construction, while warning about limited power access; the IEA flags pressure on grids, equipment supplies and local resources. Cryptopolitan previously reported that SpaceX slowed some data-center work over power redundancy and cooling problems.