SpaceX plans a $24B gas-fired power plant and supercompute campus at Starbase, Texas
What's the plan? SpaceX proposes to "construct, own and operate a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility" at Starbase, Texas, according to a City of Starbase public hearing notice reported by Reuters and Bloomberg on 9 November 2026. The notice puts the estimated capital investment for the project's initial phases at about $24 billion and says it may be built in multiple phases with future expansions, on a roughly 444-acre tract between Boca Chica Boulevard and the Port of Brownsville.
Next step: SpaceX has applied for a property tax abatement and a related economic development agreement, which the Starbase City Commission will consider at a public meeting on 9 December. The notice does not give the size or length of the abatement, the plant's generating capacity or the scale of the computing operation. Reuters said the project would be among the largest private investments in the Rio Grande Valley.
Why it matters: Owning its own generation would let SpaceX, which absorbed xAI earlier this year, avoid a years-long wait to connect a large compute campus to the Texas grid. It follows a run of AI builders turning to on-site gas, including Anthropic's $3.4B purchase of gas-fired generators, at a time when local opposition to data centres is rising across the US. A SpaceX affiliate is separately building an 8-mile gas pipeline to Starbase, due in service by January 2027.
Image: Starbase, Texas. Alexander Hatley via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
