FILE: SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, California, September 28, 2012. Photo: SpaceX / Wikimedia Commons / CC0; cropped and resized. Archive facility photo, not the proposed Texas or Arizona supercomputing campus.
SpaceX said Thursday it plans more than $74 billion of investment in supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona, expanding the infrastructure used to train artificial intelligence systems.
The company outlined a project at Starbase in the Rio Grande Valley and a roughly $50 billion campus in Cochise County, Arizona, in a November 12 statement. These are planned investments, not completed spending.
SpaceX said the Texas facility, near the Port of Brownsville, would generate its own electricity rather than draw power from the public grid. It said the project has already created more than 3,000 construction jobs and would support more than 500 permanent jobs once operating.
The statement describes the Texas investment as more than $24 billion in its overview and up to $24 billion in the detailed project section. SpaceX’s stated total for both campuses is more than $74 billion.
In Arizona, the company said it is seeking approval for a campus expected to create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs. It said it is working with local electric cooperatives on a power project that could use existing renewable resources and reduce cooperative members’ bills by up to 20%. Those savings are a company projection, not a confirmed reduction in customers’ bills.
The Arizona campus would use dry cooling, with no planned industrial groundwater use or new wells, according to SpaceX. The company said its plan includes protections for wildlife and dark skies.
SpaceX also said it committed $220 million to water and wastewater infrastructure serving Brownsville and Cameron County, including $40 million already provided to the Brownsville Public Utilities Board. It said the proposed work could add about 20 million gallons of daily water capacity.
The company said Brownsville and its utilities board would retain ownership of those facilities. It said the contribution does not buy water rights or give SpaceX preferential access to the region’s water supply.
Supercomputing campuses bring large numbers of specialized computers together to handle demanding tasks such as training AI models. SpaceX’s proposal includes plans for electricity generation and local water infrastructure alongside the computing facilities.
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