SpaceX Plans $74 Billion Investment to Build Data Centers in Texas and Arizona

Detailed summary

Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company has spent billions to develop the giant warehouses full of computer servers that power the technology.

SpaceX said on Thursday that it planned to invest $74 billion to build new data center campuses in Arizona and Texas as the company continued to pour money into the global artificial intelligence race.

The projects, proposed by Elon Musk’s rocket and A.I. company, would be among some of the largest data center projects in the United States.

In Texas, SpaceX plans to invest $24 billion in a data center campus on 444 acres of company-owned land near the Starbase rocket site in the Rio Grande Valley. The data center in Texas will generate its own power rather than rely on the public grid, the company said in its announcement. It is not immediately clear whether the project needs any further regulatory approvals.

In Arizona, SpaceX plans to build a $50 billion campus in Cochise County, which will create 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, the company said. The Arizona project still requires approval from the county.

SpaceX, which went public this year in the biggest initial public offering in history, has quickly grown its business leasing out computing power to other A.I. companies like Anthropic and Google. In October, SpaceX reported that its A.I. business accounted for more than half its revenue.

Anthropic has committed to paying up to $120.5 billion through 2029. Google is also paying SpaceX $920 million per month for computing power.

SpaceX’s A.I. unit — xAI — has been at the forefront of the data center build out and operates four data centers near Memphis, Tenn., and Southhaven, Miss. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other tech giants have spent tens of billions of dollars on their own data center campuses.

The build outs have proved costly. SpaceX said in October that capital expenditures had risen to $19.6 billion during the third quarter, nearly three times its spending from the previous year. Mr. Musk said in October that the company had also closed $40 billion in debt financing to help fund the chips needed for its data centers.

SpaceX’s chief financial…

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