74 billion dollars for two gigantic AI data centers: SpaceX invests massively in Arizona and Texas, and ensures to protect the communities

“Building the future”. It is under this title that SpaceX announced, in a press release, planning a massive investment of 74 billion dollars (50 and 24 billion), to build new “data center campuses” in Arizona and Texas, a new escalation in the race for artificial intelligence. These new data center projects from multi-billionaire Elon Musk's space and artificial intelligence company would be among the largest in the United States, according to the New York Times.

Two large-scale projects In Texas, 24 billion will be used to build a data center complex spanning almost 180 hectares of land belonging to SpaceX. An area that would correspond to approximately 252 football fields. These facilities will be near the Starbase site, the company's massive rocket launch center.

This data center will produce its own energy rather than connecting to the public electricity grid. According to SpaceX, it will use a gas-fired power plant, a solution often adopted to power data centers in the United States but which turns out to be polluting and quite noisy. Construction of the complex is already underway, as attested by a local newspaper, The Texas Tribune.

The independent media specifies that the land had been de-annexed from the neighboring town of Brownsville, thus overriding a moratorium on data centers which took effect last week. In Arizona, the company will spend $50 billion to build another data center complex in Cochise County, in the southeast of the state. A project which, according to SpaceX, should create more than 5.

500 jobs for construction, and a thousand permanent positions. It still remains subject to county approval. It is interesting to note that in both cases, SpaceX's communication takes the trouble to emphasize the company's efforts to contribute to the improvement of wastewater treatment or to collaborate with "local electricity cooperatives" in order to "strengthen regional energy infrastructure" and "potentially reduce the electricity bills of members of these cooperatives by up to 20%".

SpaceX concludes this environmental point by indicating that its IA factory, in Arizona, will use "a dry cooling system" which will require "no consumption of groundwater for industrial purposes". So many points which are indirect responses to the criticisms made against the tech giants and which have resulted in so many municipal or regional moratoriums in the United States. Even Elon Musk's company is keeping a low profile.

Performance boosted by AI SpaceX, which entered the stock market last June, had the best introduction in history, rising to more than $2.100 billion in valuation on its first day. The company was able to expand its activities by merging in particular with xAI.

It now sells computing power to other artificial intelligence giants, such as Anthropic and Google. Last month, the firm confirmed that its AI business made up more than half of its revenue. Anthropic has entered into a contract with SpaceX and will pay it up to $120.5 billion by 2029, while Google pays Elon Musk's company $920 million per month for its computing power.

A lucrative activity therefore, which could be threatened by the Democratic victory in the midterms, propelled by a trend of opposition to data centers, particularly on the rise in Texas.

Machine-translated from French