SpaceX plans 6 GW AI data center campus in Cochise, Arizona

SpaceX has confirmed that it is the company behind the largest data center proposal Arizona has ever seen, a campus for artificial intelligence in Cochise County that would draw up to 6 gigawatts (GW) of electric power at full build-out, according to the data center tracker Baxtel on November 12, 2026. A gigawatt is one billion watts, roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. For comparison, Baxtel says the biggest existing site in Arizona, Aligned Phoenix, has 180 megawatts, so the Cochise campus asks for about 33 times that.

What exactly is SpaceX proposing in Cochise County?

According to Baxtel, which cites the application, SpaceX filed through an affiliate called Tombstone Resources LLC for a special use authorization covering 747 acres along U.S. Highway 191, near the Willcox Playa, about 80 miles east of Tucson. KJZZ, the Arizona public radio station, reported on November 10 that the proposal spans about 750 acres and would use 6,000 megawatts at full build-out, and that it would be SpaceX's first facility in Arizona if approved.

The Cochise Supercomputer Campus would have nine buildings of 493,000 square feet each and be built in four phases of about 1.5 GW each, starting with roughly 1,500 megawatts, according to Baxtel. Construction could begin in March 2027 if zoning is approved, Baxtel adds, citing DCD. Tombstone plans to buy about 400 acres from the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO) and 348 acres from Southline Transmission LLC.

Only two US proposals are larger, per Baxtel and KJZZ: Kevin O'Leary's 9 GW Stratos project in Utah and Fermi America's 11 GW Project Matador near Amarillo, Texas.

How much would it cost?

Baxtel reports that Riley Trettel, who leads energy and supercomputer development at SpaceX, put the total investment at up to 50 billion dollars. KJZZ, writing two days earlier, said it was not immediately clear how much the Arizona project would cost, so the figure comes from a single reported statement and should be treated as an estimate until a filing confirms it. KJZZ also notes that SpaceX announced a separate Texas data center and natural gas project that will cost about 24 billion dollars.

Can the local grid supply 6 GW?

Not today. Baxtel reports that Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative (SSVEC), the proposed retail provider, peaks at about 250 megawatts in summer. Phase one alone would therefore need six times the cooperative's current peak demand, and the full build-out about 24 times, according to the Herald/Review as relayed by Baxtel.

Wholesale power and transmission would come from AEPCO, owner of the adjacent 626-megawatt Apache Generating Station, a coal and gas plant that had been marked for retirement by 2028 before it received nearly 21 million dollars in federal upgrade funding this summer, per the Arizona Daily Star as cited by Baxtel. SSVEC said the developer must fund every upgrade needed to deliver the full 6 GW.

The plan also includes the following elements, according to Baxtel:

• 3.6 billion dollars of new transmission infrastructure, later transferred to AEPCO at no cost to the cooperatives;
• a battery storage system of 24 gigawatt-hours;
• 90 megawatts of gas-fired backup generators.

We are paying for everything, every single cent.

What about water, jobs and local opposition?

Water is usually the flashpoint of data center fights in Arizona. According to Baxtel, SpaceX promised zero industrial water use for cooling, with servers run hotter to avoid evaporation. The application estimates a one-time fill of 3 to 5 million gallons and 2 to 3 million gallons a year for sanitation, roughly the annual use of 20 to 30 Arizona homes, and no new well would be drilled in the Willcox groundwater basin.

Trettel said the project would create about 1,000 permanent jobs and 3,000 construction jobs, generate 30 to 100 million dollars a year in property tax revenue, and deliver a one-time sales tax benefit of up to 450 million dollars, per Baxtel. These are the company's own projections, not audited figures.

Hundreds of residents packed the November 4 community meeting at Cochise Elementary School, many with protest signs, and an online petition had nearly 2,100 signatures by Thursday, according to the Herald/Review via Baxtel. Residents asked about groundwater, electricity costs and wildlife. The site sits a few thousand feet from the Willcox Playa, a wintering ground for federally protected sandhill cranes, and Arizona Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will review the designs.

Where does this fit in SpaceX's AI buildout?

Baxtel describes the filing as the first campus proposal outside Memphis and Texas from SpaceX's data center arm, formed by folding xAI into SpaceX and now branded SpaceXAI. The Memphis cluster runs the Grok chatbot and sells capacity to Anthropic and Google, per Baxtel. KJZZ adds that Mississippi environmental regulators found that SpaceXAI began construction on a data center project there without the necessary permits.

On SpaceX's August earnings call, Elon Musk said he expects roughly 15 GW of power plant capacity by the end of 2027, a figure that already assumes about a quarter of projects slip, according to Baxtel. Arizona is therefore one more site in a race for power rather than a standalone bet.

What happens next?

Cochise County adopted a dedicated data center zoning code in April, with standards for noise, water, decommissioning and financial assurances if a project closes early, per Baxtel. The county Planning and Zoning Commission holds a public hearing on December 9, 2026, at 2 p.m., moved up two hours to handle expected turnout. That hearing is the first hard gate. Separately, SSVEC has told members it anticipates filing a rate case in fall 2027, though the cooperative says those financial pressures predate the data center proposal.

What this changes for a Korean company

The two sources we could read give the 6 GW and the figure of up to 50 billion dollars for Arizona only as statements by the company, and the cost remains unconfirmed. For a Korean company, the practical lesson is about constraints rather than headlines: a gigawatt-scale AI site now depends on a utility able to deliver the power, a county willing to rezone and residents who accept it. A Korean operator, memory supplier or equipment maker should check which of these gates a customer's project has actually cleared, and treat any announced schedule as conditional on the December 9 hearing and on grid upgrades that the developer itself says it will finance.