SpaceX has asked the City of Starbase, Texas, for a property tax break tied to a gas-fired power plant and a “super-compute facility.” The first phases of the project are estimated to cost about $24 billion, according to a public notice posted by the city.
The notice is the first public document to state what SpaceX plans to build on the land. For months, the company had not disclosed its plans for the site.
The notice names Space Exploration Technologies Corp. as the property owner and applicant. It says SpaceX “proposes to construct, own, and operate a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility.” It adds that the project “may be constructed over multiple phases and include future expansions.”
How the Land Moved to Starbase
The project would sit on about 444 acres just east of Brownsville. The tract lies between Boca Chica Boulevard and the Port of Brownsville and is listed as Cameron County property ID 171887.
Brownsville commissioners voted unanimously on Aug. 29 to release the land from their jurisdiction at SpaceX’s request. That moved the site under the control of Starbase, the city formed around the company’s Starship factory and launch site.
A separate agreement approved at the same time has SpaceX providing up to $220 million for regional water and wastewater projects. The RGV Business Journal reported that SpaceX expects to eventually need about 2 million gallons of water a day.
At the time, the paper wrote that what SpaceX planned to build on the property “remains unclear.” In September, research firm SemiAnalysis said SpaceX planned a data center there. The company did not confirm that report.
Because the land is in the Cameron County Enterprise Zone, it already counts as a reinvestment zone for tax-abatement purposes. That status allows the city to consider the tax break.
Key Details Still Missing
The notice does not give the power plant’s size or the number of turbines. It also leaves out chip counts, job commitments and a construction timeline.
It does not say who would use the computing capacity. It also does not explain why SpaceX wants its own plant or whether the site would connect to the state power grid.
Social media posts have shared a figure of 35 turbines and 748 megawatts. That number does not appear in the city notice or in a state air permit, so it remains unconfirmed.
Texas has tightened grid access for data centers this year. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a pause on Aug. 3 on new data centers moving through the grid operator’s connection process, pending an audit.
Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat who won the governor’s race on Nov. 3, campaigned against AI data centers. She has since pledged to freeze data center approvals and got talk of a SpaceX land sale pulled.
Starbase is the second large data center site linked to SpaceX in a week, after a proposed 6 gigawatt campus in Cochise County, Arizona. Goldman Sachs and Apollo are also selling slices of a $40 billion Nvidia chip lease to investors.
SpaceX absorbed xAI in a stock swap in February and went public in June. Its S-1 filing said outside customer Anthropic “has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029” for compute at its Colossus clusters, with either side able to end the deal on 90 days’ notice.
Anthropic is also lining up its own power supply. It paid $3.4 billion for 1.7 gigawatts of Caterpillar gas generators, the FT reported.
The Starbase City Commission will review a Chapter 312 tax abatement and a Chapter 380 economic development agreement. The public hearing is set for Wednesday, Dec. 9.
