SpaceX Confirms 6GW AI Data Center Campus Plan for Cochise County

SpaceX has confirmed it is behind the largest data center proposal Arizona has seen, a nine-building supercomputer campus in Cochise County that would draw up to 6GW of power at full build-out. The company filed through affiliate Tombstone Resources LLC for a special use authorization covering 747 acres along U.S. Highway 191 near the Willcox Playa, about 80 miles eas wikimedia.org Featured: Wide landscape photograph of the Willcox Playa area in Cochise County where SpaceX plans its 747-acre campus.t of Tucson. The county Planning and Zoning Commission holds a public hearing on December 9.

The proposal

According to the application, the Cochise Supercomputer Campus would rise in four phases of about 1.5GW each, starting with roughly 1,500MW in phase one. Each of the nine buildings would measure 493,000 sq ft, and construction could begin in March 2027 if zoning is approved, DCD reported. Tombstone plans to buy about 400 acres from AEPCO and 348 acres from Southline Transmission LLC. Only two US proposals are larger: Kevin O'Leary's 9GW Stratos project in Utah and Fermi America's 11GW Project Matador near Amarillo, Texas, per KJZZ. Trettel put the total investment at up to $50 billion.

"I do want to confirm to you all here tonight that SpaceX is the owner, and with approval, will be the builder and the owner of the project long term," said Riley Trettel, who leads energy and supercomputer development at SpaceX, at the November 4 community meeting.

Power and water

The load dwarfs the local grid. Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative, the proposed retail provider, peaks at about 250MW in summer, so phase one alone would need six times the cooperative's current peak demand, and full build-out about 24 times, the Herald/Review reported. SSVEC said the developer must fund every upgrade needed to deliver the full 6GW and is negotiating financial protections should the project close early or draw less power than requested. Wholesale power and transmission would come from Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, owner of the adjacent 626MW Apache Generating Station, a coal and gas plant that had been marked for retirement by 2028 before it received nearly $21 million in federal upgrade funding this summer, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Trettel said SpaceX would invest $3.6 billion in new transmission infrastructure, later transferred to AEPCO at no cost to the cooperatives.

"We are paying for everything, every single cent," he said. Plans also include a 24GWh battery storage system and 90MW of gas-fired backup generators.

Water, typically the flashpoint in Arizona data center fights, would be minimal, the company said. Trettel promised zero industrial water use for cooling, with servers run hotter to avoid evaporation. The application estimates a one-time fill of 3 to 5 million gallons and 2 to 3 million gallons a year for sanitation, roughly the annual use of 20 to 30 Arizona homes. No new well would be drilled in the Willcox groundwater basin.

Local reception

Hundreds packed the November 4 meeting at Cochise Elementary School, many carrying protest signs, and an online petition against the project had nearly 2,100 signatures by Thursday, the Herald/Review reported. Trettel said the project would create about 1,000 permanent jobs and 3,000 construction jobs, generate $30 million to $100 million a year in property tax revenue, and deliver a one-time sales tax benefit of up to $450 million. Residents pressed the company on groundwater, electricity costs, wildlife and what county officials knew before the project became public. Not everyone was convinced; booing repeatedly interrupted the presentation, the paper reported.

The site sits a few thousand feet from the Willcox Playa, a wintering ground for federally protected sandhill cranes. Arizona Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will review the designs. SpaceX said it would use low-profile buildings, downward-directed lighting and wildlife-friendly fencing.

Cochise County adopted a dedicated data center zoning code in April, with standards for noise, water, decommissioning and financial assurances if a project closes early. Separately, SSVEC has told members it anticipates filing a rate case in fall 2027, though the co-op says those financial pressures predate the data center proposal. The December 9 hearing was moved up two hours, to 2 p.m., to handle expected turnout.

The SpaceXAI buildout

The filing is the first campus proposal outside Memphis and Texas from SpaceX's data center arm, formed by folding xAI into SpaceX and now branded SpaceXAI. The Memphis cluster runs the Grok chatbot and sells capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Baxtel tracks Colossus 1 at 300MW and Colossus 2 among the company's sites there. Musk this week also announced two more Mississippi data centers, named Gun Range and Spam, per DCD.

On SpaceX's August earnings call, covered by Baxtel, Musk said he expects roughly 15GW of power plant capacity by the end of 2027, a figure that already assumes about a quarter of projects slip.

Why it matters

Gigawatt AI campuses now live or die at the county counter, and Cochise County wrote its rules in April for exactly this kind of fight. SpaceX's pitch is built for cooperative territory: cover every grid dollar, take on no co-op debt, cut residential bills. The scale on offer is hard to ignore. Baxtel tracks 202 facilities in Arizona, 187 of them in Phoenix, and the state's largest site, Aligned Phoenix, has 180MW. The Cochise campus asks for 33 times that.

The first hard gate is the December 9 hearing in Bisbee.