SpaceX Plans $24 Billion Gas Power Plant and Data Center in Starbase, Texas

Starbase, Texas — SpaceX is seeking a property tax break from the city that surrounds its rocket base to build a gas-fired power plant and a “super-compute facility” there, with the first phases estimated to cost approximately $24 billion, according to a public hearing notice posted by the City of Starbase.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. appears in the notice as both the applicant and the owner of the land. SpaceX would build, own and run the two facilities, and the work could be carried out in several phases with room for later expansions, according to a report by Reuters.

Starbase's City Commission will take up the request during one of its regular sessions, at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, 2026. Two documents are on the agenda: a property tax abatement agreement under Chapter 312 of the Texas Tax Code, and an accompanying economic development agreement under Chapter 380 of the Texas Local Government Code. Neither has been approved.

The land covers approximately 444 acres in Cameron County, inside Starbase's limits, east of Brownsville and lying between Boca Chica Blvd and the Port of Brownsville. It falls within the Cameron County Enterprise Zone, which the Texas Tax Code treats as a reinvestment zone, the designation a Chapter 312 abatement requires.

At $24 billion, the scheme would be among the largest private investments ever made in the Rio Grande Valley. More than 4,000 people already work for SpaceX at Starbase, and approximately 70% of them were hired locally from the valley, the company says.

Power is the practical reason for the design. A plant of its own could allow SpaceX to bypass a wait of several years to connect a large project to Texas' main power grid, a delay that has slowed many data center developers.

The gas supply is also taking shape. Lone Star Mineral Development, an affiliate of SpaceX, has filed plans for Starpipe, a natural gas line running 8 miles to Starbase that is due to begin service by January 2027. Documents Reuters examined in June show its gas will supply a planned facility producing liquid methane for Starship rockets.

Two orbital launch pads already operate at Starbase, each with a tower built to integrate, test, launch and catch Starship and its Super Heavy booster. The city, which became incorporated in 2025, is where several hundred SpaceX staff and their families live, according to the company.

The filing arrives as resistance to data centers spreads. Such projects have lost 40 of 41 local ballot measures, while Democrats, including some who ran on halting new projects, took control of the U.S. Congress and the Texas governor's office in the midterm elections.

Computing has moved to the center of SpaceX's business since it bought Elon Musk's AI lab xAI earlier this year. Third-quarter revenue, reported on October 20, climbed 161% from a year earlier to $14.6 billion. The Super Intelligence (SI) unit generated $7.6 billion of that.

Google, Anthropic and other companies already rent computing capacity from SpaceX. Anthropic’s payments for that capacity are expected to reach $3.1 billion a month by year-end. The Claude developer also reportedly agreed to pay $3.4 billion for gas-fired generators to power its own data centers.

The build-out is expensive. Capital spending in the SI segment came to about $16.44 billion in the third quarter, taking the nine-month total close to $40 billion, and nameplate compute capacity had reached 1.7 GW by the end of September. In October, SpaceX also signed a binding commitment to lease GPUs worth approximately $40 billion through an entity managed by Apollo Global Management, with the hardware due to arrive in the first half of 2027.

Starbase is one of several big bets SpaceX is making in Texas. In Grimes County, it and Tesla are moving ahead with the first phase of Terafab, a chip-making complex budgeted at more than $16.8 billion, while filings suggest total investment across several phases could reach as much as $119 billion.

Members of the public can attend the December 9 meeting and speak on the proposed agreements before commissioners decide whether to approve them.