coindesk.com
SpaceX, a bitcoin-holding company that went public in June in the largest IPO in history, wants to build and power its own supercomputer in Texas.
The company is planning a $24 billion project at Starbase, a Texas city in Cameron County built around SpaceX’s main rocket factory and launch site. The project would include a natural gas power plant and a data center that the City Notice calls a “super-compute facility.”
For crypto readers, the scale is the point. The $24 billion project is roughly 17 times the value of SpaceX’s bitcoin holdings. As of this writing, the company held 18,712 bitcoin, worth about $1.39 billion, according to Bitcointreasuries.net.
The proposed plant would reportedly run on 35 turbines and produce 748 megawatts of power. That is a sharp contrast to most AI data centers, which plug into the local power grid.
“SpaceX proposes to construct, own, and operate a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility,” the City Notice says.
That puts it alongside Anthropic, which recently agreed to buy 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators for $3.4 billion. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. The notice does not say why SpaceX wants its own plant.
“The AI boom is becoming a gas story,” Global Commodity Trader Index, a benchmark for institutional commodity trading firms, said on X. “Tech companies are no longer willing to wait for utilities to deliver power. They're going directly to the source, securing generation capacity and scarce equipment. For gas producers, turbine manufacturers and pipeline operators, data centres are emerging as a major new source of long-term demand.”
SpaceX’s push into AI is recent.
In February, Elon Musk merged his AI company, xAI, into SpaceX in a stock swap that valued the combined firm at about $1.25 trillion.
The City of Starbase is also being asked to give SpaceX a tax break and the city commission is slated to hold a public hearing on the same on Dec. 9. The requested property tax abatement would cut SpaceX’s property taxes and allow the company use the Cameron County Enterprise Zone for the project.
Still, the road may not be smooth for Musk. Democrat Gina Hinojosa won Texas’ governor’s race on Nov. 3, ousting Republican incumbent Greg Abbott. She campaigned against AI data centers and accused Abbott of letting the energy-hungry facilities multiply.
Abbott had already ordered a pause on Aug. 3, so no more data centers can move through the state grid operator’s connection process until regulators finish an audit.
The statewide audit covers on-site power generation, including a regulatory review of how these facilities affect local water and communities regardless of where their energy source is located.
It remains to be seen whether SpaceX’s own plant will let it sidestep the regulatory hurdle.
