SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Credit: Sven Piper on Unsplash SpaceX plans to spend $74B on two AI supercomputing sites: a $50B campus in Cochise County, Arizona, and a $24B site with its own gas power plant near Starbase, Texas. It now sells computing power to Anthropic and Google, but faces local pushback in Arizona. SpaceX plans to spend $74B on two AI supercomputing sites, including a new $50B campus in Arizona, Bloomberg reported.
The company announced the plans on its website on Thursday, months after it sold bonds to fund its AI build-out. The other $24B will go to a computing site near SpaceX’s Starbase headquarters in Texas. That project includes a gas-fired power plant that SpaceX will build, own and run. The spending shows how far Elon Musk’s company has moved beyond rockets, with its AI unit out-earning Starlink last quarter.
SpaceX now rents computing power to AI firms, and Anthropic has become its biggest customer, bringing in a third of its revenue. Google has also agreed to pay it $920M a month for computing power. SpaceX says the Arizona site in Cochise County will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent ones. The Texas project has already created more than 3,000 construction jobs and will employ 500 people once it opens.
It is not clear whether the Arizona campus will also run on gas. SpaceX says it will work with local power co-ops, use existing renewable energy and rely on dry cooling to avoid using groundwater. Locals are wary. Hundreds of residents confronted SpaceX at a meeting last week over water, power bills and wildlife, a local paper reported.
In Mississippi, more than 10,000 residents have joined a lawsuit over noise from a gas power plant that powers Musk’s data centres. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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