SpaceXAI is planning a data center complex in Cochise County, Arizona that the company claims could require 6GW of power at full build out, which would make it by far the largest data center campus in the world. The application, filed through affiliate Tombstone Resources LLC, covers two plots totalling 747 acres near the Willcox Playa, a dry lake bed about 80 miles east of Tucson, on land currently owned by Arizona Electric Power Cooperative and Southline Transmission.
According to the application, the campus would eventually hold up to nine data center buildings of 493,000 square feet each, built in four stages of 1.5GW, with construction starting in March 2027 if zoning approval is received. The company says it will pay for the grid upgrades the project needs, spending some 3.6 billion dollars on power infrastructure, including 500 million dollars of work to enable the first phase, and plans a 24GWh battery storage system on site to smooth its demand. The site sits next to the cooperative’s Apache Generating Station, which produces 626MW from coal, natural gas and solar. A decision on the zoning request is scheduled for a meeting on December 9.
The claim needs to be read as a claim. SpaceXAI, now styled SpaceXSI, runs its Memphis area cluster for its Grok chatbot and AI cloud services, and Elon Musk’s statements of more than 1GW of capacity there have been disputed. Arizona’s entire grid had net capacity of 32GW in 2024 on Energy Information Administration figures, so a single 6GW customer would represent close to a fifth of the state’s generating capacity, before the separate question of securing enough AI accelerators, power equipment and cooling kit to fill it.
The proposal also lands in a changed political environment for Musk’s companies. Voters backed data center restrictions in nearly every local ballot measure decided on November 3, a trend covered here yesterday, and the county hearing this week gave residents their first formal say on the project. The December 9 decision will show whether opposition that has succeeded against smaller projects also binds at this scale.