SpaceX to Spend $74 Billion Building AI Supercomputers, and Plans to Generate Its Own Power

Reuters reports that SpaceX plans to build two AI supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona, with a total investment exceeding $74 billion.

The site in Cochise County, Arizona, covers 747 acres and will be built in four phases, with a maximum power load of up to 6 GW and an investment of about $50 billion. The Texas Starbase campus will involve more than $24 billion and will be paired with an on-site gas-fired power plant that supplies power directly to computing equipment, bypassing the public grid. Starbase is SpaceX's base in Texas.

The Arizona site will use dry cooling and does not plan to draw industrial groundwater. The company says local cooperative members' electricity bills could fall by as much as 20%.

6 GW is a scale that most large data center campuses cannot match, roughly equivalent to the output of several large nuclear power units. For a single site to require this much power means the constraints on expansion have shifted.

Some commenters in the discussion said that 6 GW for one site is absurd and that power, not chips, is now the real bottleneck. The very act of building its own gas-fired power plant illustrates the problem: grid interconnection queues and grid capacity may be harder to solve than buying GPUs.

This judgment is not new, but SpaceX's approach has brought it into the open. Competition in AI infrastructure is extending from chip procurement to land acquisition, power acquisition, and cooling water. Arizona's choice of dry cooling and its promise of lower electricity bills factor community relations into costs in advance. Texas's direct construction of its own power plant bypasses the public grid's queue times.

Reuters original link: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-invest-over-74-billion-supercompute-facilities-texas-arizona-2026-11-12/