On November 12, 2026, SpaceX announced plans to invest more than $74 billion in two AI supercomputing campuses: one at its Starbase site in Texas, at more than $24 billion, and one in Cochise County, Arizona, at about $50 billion. Reuters reported that SpaceX's AI business already accounted for more than half of the company's revenue in the third quarter, making supercomputing investment a third pillar alongside rockets and Starlink.
How the two campuses divide the work
| Campus | Investment | Key points |
|---|---|---|
| Starbase, Texas | Over $24 billion | Generates its own electricity without drawing on the public grid; trains frontier AI models for medical research, emergency response, advanced manufacturing, and national security, and supports research into future space-based computing |
| Cochise County, Arizona | About $50 billion | Up to 6 GW across nine buildings in four phases; about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs; dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use |
The money is not fully committed yet — permits are the immediate hurdle. Both campuses face local votes on December 9: the Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will consider special-use permit application SU26-22, which a petition of about 2,400 signatures asks officials to deny, while the Starbase City Commission will consider a property-tax abatement the same day. The Arizona power agreement still needs approval from the state regulator, and SpaceX has disclosed no accelerator suppliers, network architecture, or commissioning schedule.
In scale, the commitment is hard to ignore. The AI compute race has spread from models themselves to land, power, and permits: the recently disclosed Huawei Horinger data center, at about 81,000 H100 equivalents, amounts to only 7% of Colossus 2. Whether SpaceX's campuses turn promises into compute will first be decided by the two votes on December 9. Even if the votes pass, the Arizona power agreement and the pace of the four-phase buildout remain open questions, and the commissioning schedule will have to wait for future disclosures.
