SpaceXAI Eyes Gigawatt-Scale Data Center in Texas, Report Says

SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is exploring plans to build a large-scale data center in Texas, according to a report from The Information. The move signals a major terrestrial expansion for a company that has long pitched orbital computing as its endgame, but is now racing to secure physical infrastructure to meet surging AI demand.

The company has scouted multiple sites across the state and aims to deploy compute capacity at a scale comparable to—or exceeding—its existing gigawatt-level data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Mississippi. While the final plan remains fluid, SpaceXAI has not yet decided whether to build a single massive facility, a cluster of smaller sites, or retrofit an existing warehouse for immediate deployment.

To support this ambition, SpaceXAI has posted job listings for a data center development lead in Austin and Bastrop, Texas, as well as temporary roles tied to “data center construction, expansion, and operations” in Conroe, Texas. Conroe is also the planned location for a “Terafab” semiconductor factory, a joint venture between SpaceX and Tesla that underscores Musk’s broader strategy of vertically integrating chip manufacturing with AI compute infrastructure.

Earlier this month, it emerged that Musk quietly acquired APR Energy, a mobile gas-fired power generation firm with operations in Texas and elsewhere. The purchase gives SpaceXAI potential access to flexible, on-site power generation—a critical resource for gigawatt-scale data centers that often face grid interconnection delays and capacity constraints.

SpaceXAI’s data centers were initially built to support internal workloads for its Grok chatbot and X social platform. But the company has rapidly evolved into a major neocloud provider, signing leasing agreements with AI startups Reflection and Anthropic, as well as with Google. The company is also in talks with the U.S. military as a potential customer, the report noted.

Industry analysts view the Texas expansion as a pragmatic pivot. While SpaceXAI has long promoted its vision of deploying significant compute capacity in space, the immediate demand for low-latency, high-bandwidth AI training and inference is driving the company to invest heavily in terrestrial infrastructure. The move also positions SpaceXAI to compete more directly with established cloud providers and neocloud rivals that are rapidly expanding their own fleets of GPU clusters.