SpaceX plans to build, own and operate a gas-fired power plant and a super-computing facility at Starbase, the Texas company town it effectively controls, according to a public hearing notice posted on the city's website and first reported by Bloomberg. The notice pegs estimated capital investment for the project's initial phases at $24 billion on a 444-acre site, which would make it one of the largest private investments in the Rio Grande Valley.
The Starbase City Commission will consider a Texas Chapter 312 property tax abatement and a related Chapter 380 economic development agreement at a public meeting on December 9. The notice does not say how large the abatement would be, how long it would last, or how much generating capacity and computing scale the complex would ultimately have, noting only that the work may proceed in multiple phases with possible future expansions.
Chinese financial media, citing permit filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, reported that the on-site plant would run 35 gas turbines with about 748 megawatts of capacity. Those figures did not appear in Bloomberg's or Reuters' coverage and should be treated as unconfirmed until the filings themselves are independently reviewed.
Building its own plant would let SpaceX skip the years-long wait to interconnect with the Texas grid, the same behind-the-meter logic now spreading across the AI data center buildout. SpaceX affiliate Lone Star Mineral Development has already filed plans for an eight-mile natural gas pipeline to Starbase, called Starpipe, scheduled for service by January 2027; filings Reuters reviewed in June describe a plant that turns gas into liquid methane for Starship launches. The company has also been hiring natural gas traders in Starbase and Cape Canaveral to secure fuel and power for its growing facilities.
The filing lands in a hostile zoning climate. Voters rejected data-center measures in 40 of 41 local ballot measures this month, and Democrats who campaigned on pausing new projects took control of Congress and the Texas governor's office in the midterms. Owning its power plant inside a town where hundreds of SpaceX employees and their families live gives the company a route around both the grid queue and the local opposition that has stalled projects elsewhere.
The compute complex extends an AI business SpaceX built quickly after absorbing Elon Musk's xAI earlier this year. The company says it rents computing capacity to Google and Anthropic, and reported third-quarter revenue up 161 percent with AI revenue up roughly ninefold — figures from its own release rather than audited statements.
A rocket company converting launch infrastructure into power-and-compute real estate is among the clearest signs that the AI buildout has outgrown the grid's ability to serve it. The December 9 hearing will test how much tax relief a company town will grant one of its own anchor employers — and whether $24 billion of behind-the-meter compute can clear the permitting bar that has stopped or delayed projects across the rest of the country.
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