SpaceX Seeks Approval for 6GW AI Data Centre Campus in Rural Arizona

The application, for a supercomputer and AI data centre campus along U.S. Highway 191 near the Apache Generating Station, was filed with Cochise County by a company called Tombstone Resources LLC. Local broadcaster KVOA reported that SpaceX confirmed at a community meeting on Wednesday that it was behind the plan, and that a company representative said it had been filed under another name because SpaceX's name "draws attention" from outside the county. Another local station, KOLD, reported that the exact relationship between SpaceX and Tombstone Resources remained unclear. DatacenterDynamics described the developer as SpaceXAI, reflecting SpaceX's ownership of Elon Musk's AI company xAI, and reported that construction could start in March 2027.

If built to the size described, the campus would be among the largest AI computing sites proposed in the United States. Six gigawatts is several times the demand of most large data centre campuses now under construction, and the plan would give SpaceX ground-based capacity for training and running its Grok models at a time when local opposition to data centres has become a political issue across the country.

The county has stressed that the power figure and other numbers come from the applicant and have not been independently verified. According to the application materials, the campus would have up to nine computing buildings, built in four phases, along with battery storage, electrical systems and cooling. DatacenterDynamics put each building at 493,000 square feet. The plans include a 24GWh battery energy storage system intended to keep the site's power demand steady so it does not disrupt Arizona's grid, and the buildings would use dry cooling, which relies on air rather than water. When computing capacity comes online depends on grid upgrades being completed, according to the filing as described in reports. The application estimates about 1,000 permanent jobs.

The land is zoned rural, so the project needs a Special Use Authorization from the county. The county's Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, and its decision is final unless appealed to the Board of Supervisors.

Opposition has already organised. Public radio station KJZZ reported that more than 1,000 people had signed a petition against the project before Wednesday's meeting, which SpaceX hosted at Cochise Elementary School. Water use is a sensitive question in the arid region, which the dry cooling design is meant to address.

The proposal arrives in a week when data centre developers are reckoning with voter resistance after the US midterm elections, in which local ballot measures on data centres went heavily against the industry. OpenAI responded on Thursday with a pledge to pay for the power its sites use and to drop non-disclosure agreements with local officials. SpaceX has not said publicly how it would handle the cost of the grid upgrades its Arizona campus would need.

The December 9 hearing is the next formal step, and the commission's vote will determine whether the project can proceed on the timetable described.