SpaceX · Compute · 13 Nov 2026
SpaceX's $50 billion Arizona compute campus: 6 GW, no turbines, and a zoning vote on Dec 9
SpaceX has put the full plan for its Cochise County, Arizona supercomputing campus on its own website: nine buildings, up to 6 gigawatts, a 24 GWh battery and a $50 billion investment pledge (as of 13 Nov 2026). It runs on grid power with no on-site turbines, which is the opposite of the gas-plant approach SpaceX filed for at Starbase. Nothing is approved yet. The county planning commission hears the case on Wednesday, Dec 9.
On this page
The editor holds Tesla and SpaceX shares. Supercharged Daily is independent and not affiliated with either company. Nothing here is financial advice.
SpaceX posted the plan on Thursday, Nov 12, at 11:09 a.m. ET (8:09 a.m. PT), linking to a new page at spacex.com/sites/cochise-county. Elon Musk reposted it early Friday. The post pairs the site with Starbase: "From the Rio Grande Valley, TX to Cochise County, AZ, we're building more than supercomputers."
The application itself is older. Cochise County says it received a special use request from Tombstone Resources L.L.C. at 4:58 p.m. local time on Oct 30 for nine data center buildings plus battery storage on land zoned RU-4 (Rural). The county's data centers page, last updated Nov 12, puts the site on about 747 acres along U.S. Highway 191 near Cochise, Arizona, and says the applicant plans up to nine computing buildings in four phases. The Arizona Daily Star reported that SpaceX presented the project to nearly 300 people at a Nov 4 community meeting in Cochise. What is new this week is SpaceX putting its own name and numbers on a public page.
From the Rio Grande Valley, TX to Cochise County, AZ, we're building more than supercomputers. We're creating jobs, investing in critical infrastructure, expanding local tax bases, and working alongside communities to build a future that benefits the people who live there
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 12, 2026
What SpaceX says it will build
Per the SpaceX site page, the campus has nine single-story compute buildings of about 493,000 square feet each, plus electrical buildings, an operations and security building, and yards for dry coolers, transformers and batteries. The page says the compute will "train SpaceX's super intelligence models" and support medical research, emergency response, manufacturing and national security.
- Power: up to 6 GW from the grid, through the Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative (SSVEC) and the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO), to a utility-owned substation on site.
- Battery: 24 GWh, which SpaceX calls the largest battery energy storage system in the United States. That is SpaceX's claim; I haven't seen it checked independently.
- Backup: about 10 MW of pipeline-gas generators per building for critical loads only, with no bulk fuel stored.
- Water: dry cooling with sealed loops and no evaporative towers. SpaceX puts total use at full build-out at up to 10 acre-feet a year, which it compares to 20 to 30 Arizona homes.
- Jobs: 1,000 permanent and about 5,500 at peak construction.
Arizona against Starbase
The two sites SpaceX named in the same post are built on different power plans. At Starbase, a City of Starbase notice describes "a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility" with about $24 billion in initial phases, and a pending state air filing reported by The 956 Report lists 35 temporary turbines of about 748 MW. The Arizona page says "No turbines will be used on-site" and that there is no on-site power plant or fuel yard.
| Cochise County, AZ | Starbase, TX | |
|---|---|---|
| Stated investment | $50 billion (committed, per SpaceX) | About $24 billion, initial phases (city notice) |
| Power source | Grid, via two cooperatives | Own gas-fired plant |
| Size | Up to 6 GW | Not stated in the notice; turbine filing about 748 MW |
| On-site turbines | None | 35 temporary units in the pending filing |
| Next public hearing | Dec 9, 2 p.m. MST, county planning commission | Dec 9, 7 p.m. CT, city tax abatement |
Arizona figures are from SpaceX's site page and Cochise County, as of 13 Nov 2026. Starbase figures are from my Nov 10 report, which cites the city notice and The 956 Report's reading of the state filing.
Both hearings fall on the same day. In Eastern time, Arizona's starts at 4 p.m. ET (1 p.m. PT) and Starbase's at 8 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT).
Running the numbers
A few things fall out of SpaceX's own figures. These are my calculations, not figures SpaceX published. Dividing 24 GWh by 6 GW gives four hours of storage at full load. Six gigawatts across nine buildings is roughly 670 MW a building, and nine buildings at 493,000 square feet comes to about 4.4 million square feet of compute floor. The $50 billion pledge works out to about $8.3 billion per gigawatt. Ten acre-feet is about 3.3 million gallons a year. SpaceX hasn't said whose batteries it will use. For scale only, 24 GWh would equal about 6,100 of Tesla's roughly 3.9 MWh Megapack 2 XL units.
KJZZ called it the largest data center proposal in Arizona: six times the load of Pima County's Project Blue and twice the rejected La Osa plan in Pinal County. By KJZZ's count it would be third in the US for scale, behind Fermi America's 11 GW Project Matador in Texas and Kevin O'Leary's 9 GW Stratos Project in Utah.
Promises versus things already done
Done: the application is filed (Oct 30), the community meeting happened (Nov 4), and SpaceX has published its plan. On Nov 12 the county's Local Emergency Planning Committee recommended requiring a study of local first responders and a site-specific emergency plan, according to the Tucson Daily Brief. It noted the site sits outside any fire district.
Still promises: the $50 billion, the jobs, and the money for local power users. SpaceX projects a 10 to 40% cut in electricity bills for SSVEC members "for the life of the project," $3.6 billion in grid upgrades handed to AEPCO at no cost, and, at full build-out, up to $260 million a year to SSVEC and up to $200 million a year to AEPCO. A later FAQ on the same SpaceX page breaks the SSVEC figure into up to $190 million a year for capital improvements and member benefits and up to $53 million a year for the SSVEC Foundation. Those two lines add to $243 million, not $260 million (my calculation). The FAQ says the cooperative payments are "subject to final negotiations." The county side also gets a projected $34 to $103 million a year in new property tax and about $250 million in one-time county sales tax in year one.
KJZZ reported that SSVEC says it will make the developer pay for the upgrades needed to deliver all 6 GW, that it is negotiating protections in case the project closes or uses less power than requested, and that it expects to file a rate case in fall 2027. More than 1,000 people had signed a petition against the project by early November, KJZZ said.
What happens on Dec 9
The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission hears case SU26-22 on Wednesday, Dec 9, at 2 p.m. MST (4 p.m. ET, 1 p.m. PT) in Bisbee. The county's data center page, re-checked on 13 Nov 2026, says the hearing moved up from 4 p.m. "due to significant public interest," and that speakers get two minutes each. Written comments must arrive by noon MST on Friday, Nov 27 (2 p.m. ET) to make the commissioners' packet. The commission can approve, approve with conditions, or deny, and its decision is final unless appealed to the Board of Supervisors. (An earlier Nov 2 county newsflash still lists 4 p.m.; the data centers page is the later source.)
The site is a few thousand feet from Willcox Playa, a wintering ground for sandhill cranes. SpaceX lists dry cooling with no open water, shielded downward lighting and underground power lines inside the campus, and says designs will go to Arizona Game and Fish and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
My read
SpaceX has clearly learned from the backlash data centers have had this year. The Arizona page answers water, noise, lights and power bills before anyone asks, and it drops the on-site gas plant entirely. That makes it a stronger pitch than Starbase's. The weak spot is that most of the money for residents depends on cooperative deals that aren't signed, and SpaceX's own page does not quite add up on the SSVEC total. If the staff report, which the county says will go out with the hearing packet one week before Dec 9, so around Dec 2, shows those terms in writing, I think it passes with conditions. I'll update this page after the vote.
— Alex R
Sources: SpaceX, Cochise County, AZ site page (re-checked 13 Nov 2026); @SpaceX on X (Nov 12, 2026); Cochise County news release on SU26-22; Cochise County Data Centers page (last updated Nov 12, re-checked 13 Nov); KJZZ (Nov 3); Arizona Daily Star; Tucson Daily Brief (Nov 12); Supercharged Daily on the Starbase notice. Hero photo: The Old Pueblo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Never Electrek.
