Starbase, formerly known as Boca Chica Village or Kopernik Shores, sits near the mouth of the Rio Grande River adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border. SpaceX selected the site in 2014 to host its rocket launch operations, and Musk announced plans in 2021 to incorporate the area as a new city, which was officially established in 2025. Many of the city's roughly 500 residents are SpaceX employees, and Bobby Peden, a SpaceX vice president, currently serves as mayor.
The company's data center and AI division, SpaceXAI, also known as SpaceXSI, operates the Memphis-area cluster used to run its Grok AI chatbot and provide AI cloud services to clients including Anthropic and Google. Musk recently announced two additional Mississippi data centers named Gun Range and Spam, and has claimed more than 1GW of capacity in the Memphis cluster, though those figures have been disputed. SpaceX is separately pursuing a 6GW cluster in Cochise County, Arizona, potentially comprising up to nine buildings on 747 acres near the Willcox Playa, and Musk has floated plans for a $20 billion chip fabrication facility in Texas dubbed TeraFab.
The Starbase proposal underscores a broader industry trend in which technology and aerospace companies are seeking to co-locate power generation with compute infrastructure to bypass grid interconnection delays and secure reliable electricity for energy-intensive AI workloads. By pairing a dedicated gas plant with a supercomputing facility on its own incorporated land, SpaceX would gain greater control over both energy supply and operational timelines, a model increasingly attractive to developers facing constrained power markets across the United States.