SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson, Teslarati reported. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX's involvement only became public on Nov. 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it "draws attention" from outside the county, local station KVOA reported, according to Teslarati.
Six gigawatts, dry cooling, and a December hearing
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 gigawatts, reaching 6 gigawatts at full build, backed by a 24 gigawatt-hour battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis cited by Teslarati.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 gigawatt of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 gigawatts, Teslarati reported.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on Dec. 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due Nov. 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027. The Texas project faces a vote the same day, Teslarati reported.
The $50 billion figure makes the scale of the Arizona plan public for the first time. What remains unsettled is whether Cochise County will approve a campus that would dwarf the Valley's existing data-center load, and how a plant once headed for retirement becomes the power source for 6 gigawatts of computing.