SpaceX Plans $74 Billion in Arizona, Texas Data Centers

The company famous for leaving Earth now wants a very large piece of it.

SpaceX said Thursday it plans to invest more than $74 billion in two AI supercomputing campuses, according to The Hill ^[2]. Roughly $50 billion would go to rural Cochise County, Arizona, east of Tucson, and more than $24 billion to a site near its Starbase headquarters in Texas ^[2][1].

The plan by the numbers

• The Arizona campus would cover 747 acres with up to nine computing buildings, Benzinga reported ^[3].
• At full build-out it would need about 6 gigawatts, nearly ten times the 626 megawatts of the nearby Apache Generating Station ^[3].
• The Texas project sits on 444 acres and would run on a natural gas plant SpaceX would build and own, Bisnow reported ^[1].
• SpaceX also pledged $220 million to expand the water supply in nearby Brownsville, Texas, The Hill reported ^[2].

But the money is a plan, not a contract. Benzinga noted the $74 billion is spending over time that may overlap with existing commitments, and the Arizona power supplier has not finalized an agreement ^[3]. A petition against the Arizona campus has 2,400 signatures, and the developer estimates $3.6 billion in transmission and substation upgrades ^[3]. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott paused new data center construction pending a statewide audit, The Hill reported ^[2].

What it means for you

Data centers are now buying farmland-scale sites and paying for their own power. By our math, the Arizona plan works out to about $66.9 million of investment per acre and roughly 8 megawatts per acre ^[3]. Landowners near transmission lines in rural counties are the quiet winners when deals like this close. The risk is local approval: a project this size can still stall at a county hearing, so land bought on speculation near a proposed campus carries real timing risk.

Zoom out

SpaceX spent about $48 billion on capital projects in the first nine months of 2026, nearly $40 billion of it on AI infrastructure, according to Benzinga ^[3]. Its AI unit brought in $7.56 billion of the company's $14.6 billion in third-quarter revenue ^[3].