SpaceXAI is planning a new data center complex in Cochise County, Arizona, with Elon Musk’s firm claiming it could require 6GW of power at full build-out.

The company wants to develop on two plots totaling 747 acres near the Willcox Playa, a dry lake 80 miles east of Tucson. The land parcels are currently owned by power firms Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO) and Southline Transmission LLC.

An application has been made, via SpaceXAI affiliate company Tombstone Resources LLC, to Cochise County for a special development permit, and a public meeting took place this week where representatives of the company spoke to residents about its plans.

According to SpaceXAI’s application, the campus will eventually feature up to nine data center buildings, each measuring 493,000 sq ft (45,801 sqm). The company hopes to bring it online in four 1.5GW stages, with construction work starting in March 2027 if zoning approval is received.

When the compute will be available is dependent on grid upgrades being completed, SpaceXAI said. The company is apparently going to foot the bill for these upgrades, and will spend some $3.6 billion on power infrastructure, with work costing $500 million to be carried out to enable phase one of the data center to be constructed. The site is adjacent to AEPCO’s Apache Generating Station, which produces 626MW via coal, natural gas, and solar.

Musk’s firm plans to install a 24GWh battery energy storage system at the data center to keep supply to the data center steady as demand fluctuates, so that its power usage does not impact Arizona’s grid. A decision on the zoning request will be made at a meeting on December 9.

SpaceXAI, now styled as SpaceXSI, runs a cluster of data centers around Memphis, with one located in Tennessee and the rest over the state border in Mississippi. They are used to run the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, and provide AI cloud services to clients including Anthropic and Google. This week Musk announced two new Mississippi data centers, named Gun Range and Spam. The billionaire claims to have more than 1GW of capacity in the Memphis cluster, though these claims have been disputed.

A 6GW data center would be by far the largest in the world, and while sourcing sufficient power for the facility in Arizona may be possible (the state had net capacity of 32GW in its grid in 2024, according to Energy Information Administration statistics), getting hold of enough AI accelerators to fill and run such a facility, as well as all the power and cooling kit required to service them, will likely be an even bigger challenge.

Musk, a high-profile backer of President Donald Trump and the Republican party, is hoping to build a $20 billion chip factory in Texas, dubbed the TeraFab, to make silicon for his companies, but could face a more hostile environment in the Lone Star State after Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa swept to victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Speaking to CNN on Thursday, Hinojosa said: “We can have a strong working relationship with Elon Musk and his companies, but it has to be on our terms. It cannot be just running over the people of Texas, and that’s what changes now that I will be governor.”