SpaceX has proposed building a gas-fired power plant and supercomputer facility at Starbase, Texas, with a reported capital investment of $24 billion, according to a CoinDesk report published November 9, 2026. CoinDesk quotes a city notice as saying SpaceX “proposes to construct, own, and operate a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility.”

The proposal

  • CoinDesk says the $24 billion figure covers the full project, the data center and the gas power plant, and is about 17 times the value of SpaceX’s bitcoin holdings. At the time of writing, SpaceX held 18,712 bitcoin, worth about $1.39 billion, according to Bitcointreasuries.net, as cited by CoinDesk.
  • The plant would reportedly have 35 turbines producing 748 megawatts, according to a post on X cited by CoinDesk. The notice does not explain why SpaceX wants its own plant, according to the article.
  • Starbase, a city in Cameron County that grew around SpaceX’s main rocket factory and launch site, has been asked to grant a property tax abatement that would let the project use the Cameron County Enterprise Zone. The city commission will hold a public hearing on December 9.

What is and is not approved

CoinDesk says nothing in its reporting indicates approval of the tax break, the data center or the power plant, and the hearing’s outcome is not yet known. The article also notes that Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on August 3: under it, no new data centers can move through the state grid operator’s connection process until a statewide audit, which covers on-site power generation, is finished. CoinDesk says it is unclear whether SpaceX’s own plant avoids that hurdle. It adds that Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the Texas governor’s race on November 3 after campaigning against AI data centers.

Background

According to CoinDesk, SpaceX went public in June in what the article calls the largest IPO in history, and in February merged with Elon Musk’s AI company xAI in a stock swap that valued the combined firm at about $1.25 trillion. CoinDesk quotes a commodity-trading benchmark account on X, the Global Commodity Trader Index, as saying: “The AI boom is becoming a gas story.”

Sources and notes

This post is based on CoinDesk’s article by Omkar Godbole, published November 9, 2026 and updated the same day. Lens did not read the city notice or SpaceX’s filings and did not verify the turbine count, which CoinDesk attributes to a post on X. Lens did not contact SpaceX or the City of Starbase.

Image: SpaceX’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, seen from across the bay, by Lars Plougmann via Wikimedia Commons, released under CC BY-SA 2.0; cropped. The photograph dates from September 2021, so the vehicles shown are not current.