The city of Starbase, Texas, the SpaceX company town, is set to vote on a proposed $24 billion gas-powered AI supercomputer data center to be built within its limits.
Starbase, Texas, which hosts SpaceX's Starship rocket program, has just posted notice of a public hearing on a gas-fired power plant and supercomputing facility within the city's corporate limits. The project has an initial cost of $24 billion and will apparently be owned by SpaceX. Bloomberg reports that the project could face resistance from incoming Texas governor Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned against approving new data centers until the state legislature enacts stronger protections against potential harms from those projects.
Until now, Elon Musk's SpaceXSI has been building out its Colossus I and Colossus II data centers near the Mississippi-Tennessee border. Those projects have faced backlash, including a lawsuit from area residents that aims to curb the pollutants produced by the large number of gas turbines required to power them.
SpaceXSI now appears to want to build another site in Texas, in a city that mostly sits on land owned by SpaceX and whose population mostly consists of its own employees. The project may face less local opposition than the company's Memphis facilities, since Starbase is essentially a company town for SpaceX. However, Hinojosa's arrival in the governor's office could override that seemingly permissive local regulatory climate.
The project appears to be part of SpaceX's push to build 10 gigawatts of compute in 2027 alone. With a $24 billion budget for this facility, it could become one of the largest and most expensive data center projects focused on a single site. The company's announcement notes that the $24 billion covers only the "initial phases of the projects" and that it could "include future expansions." That suggests SpaceXSI could invest in additional capacity in Starbase going forward, assuming the favorable regulatory climate the company likely hopes for in the area holds.
Beyond its terrestrial ambitions in Starbase, SpaceX continues to work on launching data centers into space. Musk has already outlined plans for a first-generation AI1 compute satellite with a 150kW peak compute payload, and the company has submitted a proposal to the FCC to build a 1-million-satellite Orbital Data Center System. That work could accelerate after data center measures lost decisively in polling during the recent U.S. midterm elections. In a post-election message on X, Musk remarked that "data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."