SpaceX has asked the City of Starbase, Texas, to greenlight a $24 billion project that would pair a natural gas-fired power plant with an on-site "super-compute facility," a filing that puts the rocket maker's energy ambitions far above the scale of its cryptocurrency holdings.
The proposed outlay is roughly 17 times the $1.39 billion value of the 18,712 bitcoin SpaceX disclosed in its initial public offering paperwork earlier this year, based on current prices. The company is also seeking a property tax abatement and access to the Cameron County Enterprise Zone, and the city commission has scheduled a public hearing on that request for Dec. 9.
According to a city notice, "SpaceX proposes to construct, own, and operate a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility." The site would sit at Starbase, the company town built around SpaceX's rocket factory and launch complex in Cameron County.
The generating plant would reportedly run 35 turbines with a combined capacity of 748 megawatts, a scale that departs from the usual practice among artificial intelligence data centers of drawing power from the local grid rather than building dedicated generation.
The notice does not explain why SpaceX wants its own plant. The move into AI infrastructure is recent: in February, Elon Musk merged his AI startup xAI into SpaceX through a stock swap that valued the combined company at about $1.25 trillion. SpaceX went public in June, raising $75 billion in what was the largest IPO on record.
The gas-fired approach echoes a wider industry shift. Anthropic recently agreed to purchase 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators for $3.4 billion, the Financial Times reported, and the Global Commodity Trader Index wrote on X that "the AI boom is becoming a gas story."
Note: Bitcoin figure reflects current prices at the time of the filing.
Political conditions in Texas could complicate the plan. Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governor's race on Nov. 3, unseating Republican incumbent Greg Abbott after a campaign that criticized unchecked data center growth. Abbott had already paused new data centers from moving through the state grid operator's interconnection process on Aug. 3, pending an audit of on-site generation and its effects on water supplies and host communities.
Whether SpaceX's own plant would allow it to avoid that regulatory bottleneck remains unclear. The statewide audit covers on-site power generation regardless of energy source, and includes a review of how such facilities affect local water and communities.
For investors, the filing signals that SpaceX intends to control its own power supply as AI computing demand strains grids, a strategy that could lower long-run energy costs but exposes the company to permitting and political risk in a state whose new governor has taken a harder line on data center expansion. The project's price tag also dwarfs the company's bitcoin position, underscoring that the treasury stake is a minor part of its capital allocation.
