SpaceX's $74 billion AI campuses: Starbase gas power, an Arizona county vote and what is still undisclosed

SpaceX said on November 12, 2026 that it will put more than $74 billion into two AI supercomputing campuses, one at its Starbase launch site in Texas and one in Cochise County, Arizona. It is the biggest single compute announcement of the week, and one of the least finished: neither campus has final approval, and the company has not said what chips will fill them. Here is what is confirmed, what is a projection, and what to watch.

The numbers SpaceX gave

Reuters, in a report republished by Investing.com on November 12, says the plan covers more than $24 billion at Starbase and roughly $50 billion in Cochise County, with the company describing it as "expanding its AI computing ambitions alongside rocket and satellite businesses." Converge Digest, which cites SpaceX's "Building the Future" initiative, says the Texas figure is up to $24 billion on SpaceX-owned land of about 444 acres.

Jobs are projections. For Texas, Reuters reports more than 3,000 construction jobs so far and more than 500 permanent jobs once operating. For Arizona, it reports about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs.

Converge Digest also flags two things not to add in. A separately announced $100 billion Terafab chip project is not inside the $74 billion, and neither is a previously disclosed $40 billion Nvidia equipment lease. Those totals count different things.

Texas: a campus that makes its own power

The Starbase campus would generate its own electricity rather than rely on the public grid, per Reuters. A city notice mentions a gas-fired power plant and supercomputing facility on about 444 acres. SpaceX committed $220 million to water and wastewater infrastructure, of which $40 million has been provided, which Converge Digest says would add about 20 million gallons a day, 8 million from potable reuse and 12 million from brackish water treatment.

Self-generation is the point. Grid interconnection for a campus this size can take years, and the gas turbine supply chain is itself a constraint, as the SoftBank turbine writedown this week showed. We explain the turbine bottleneck in our explainer published alongside this report. Our earlier look at converted jet engines powering AI data centers covers one workaround.

The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for the project on December 9, per Reuters.

Arizona: 6 gigawatts, a county vote and a petition

The Arizona project is larger and further from approval. KJZZ reported on November 10 that the Cochise County proposal would draw 6,000 megawatts at full buildout on about 750 acres, and that the filing's applicant of record is Tombstone Resources L.L.C., which will buy another 348 acres from Southline Transmission to complete the "data center and battery energy storage system campus." KJZZ also wrote that "If approved, the project would be SpaceX's first facility in Arizona," and that it was not immediately clear what the Arizona project would cost. The roughly $50 billion figure arrived two days later.

SpaceX says it is working with local electric cooperatives and that the project could cut bills for cooperative members by up to 20%, per Reuters. It says the campus will use dry cooling, with no industrial groundwater consumption or new wells planned, per Converge Digest. Reuters reports a petition with 2,400 signatures asks officials to deny the permit and a county hearing is set for December. Converge Digest puts the local hearing on December 9, the same date as the Texas vote.

Note what is missing. The Reuters report gives no megawatt or gigawatt figures for either campus, and the 6 gigawatt number comes from the county application as reported by KJZZ, not from SpaceX's announcement.

What SpaceX has not said

Converge Digest lists what is not disclosed: accelerator suppliers, network architecture, electrical capacity and commissioning schedules. That matters because $74 billion is a ceiling on ambition, not a count of chips. Nvidia is the obvious supplier given the lease, but nobody has confirmed it for these sites.

The pushback so far is a county petition, not a vote. Local opposition of this kind is the same force behind the data center ballot measures we reported after the midterms, including the Ohio bans and a Texas moratorium push.

The scale in context

The two sites are very different in kind. Starbase is a plan on land SpaceX already owns, with its own gas plant, so the main hurdles are a tax abatement and its own construction. Arizona is a bigger, newer proposal that needs a county to say yes to a 6 gigawatt application. Reuters reports Texas already has more than 3,000 construction jobs, while Arizona's 5,500 construction jobs are a projection that depends on a permit. When you compare the two headline numbers, remember that $24 billion is for a site already moving and $50 billion is for one that is not.

What it means for the race

SpaceX is now building compute at a scale that puts it alongside the largest labs, and doing it with its own power rather than waiting on utilities. If both campuses clear approval, that adds a self-powered competitor in the same fight where OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are signing multibillion dollar power deals. The lawsuit filed the same day by nonprofits seeking to halt frontier development, which names SpaceX's AI unit, shows how quickly the legal environment around these buildouts is changing.

Our take

Read this as an announcement of intent with two hard checkpoints. On December 9 we will know whether Starbase gets its tax abatement and whether Arizona's hearing moves toward a permit or stalls. Until then, the number to carry is not $74 billion but zero: no gigawatt has been commissioned, no chip supplier named, and no county has voted. We will update the story when either does.