Elon Musk’s Bastrop County empire set to expand again

With Elon Musk’s real estate and business dealings, two words are always paramount: bigger and more.

Those two driving ideas are on full display with his plans for the new SpaceX campus in Bastrop County, just east of Austin. SpaceX will be expanding the solar production facility on FM 1209 to 11 million square feet, according to the Austin Business Journal. The “Gigasat” will be one million square feet bigger than the Tesla “Gigafactory” just down the road from the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

The Gigasat will be utilized for a project with common Muskian ambition: sending data centers to space. The goal is to have data centers in orbit by the end of 2027, the outlet reported. Each satellite produced is expected to handle 150 kilowatts of computing power, and SpaceX’s goal is to launch 6,500 satellites by the end of 2027.

According to Musk, the additions to the Gigasat will be a solar ingots and wafers production facility (the building blocks of solar panels), next to the solar cell factory. The AI satellite factory will be built along FM 1209. Musk gave a vague timeline, saying that the buildings will be operating “at some reasonable volume” by the end of 2027.

Both facilities are still smaller than the planned Terafab in Aggieland, a $20-billion-plus project that aims to build out next-gen semiconductor manufacturing. The industrial property will also help scale production in other areas of Musk’s fiefdom, namely Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and the new Gigasat facility. Musk has said that his companies have around 1,000 acres of land near Bastrop.

Last week, Grimes County officials voted to approve a new tax investment zone and tax abatement, essentially giving Musk’s Terafab in Aggieland a boost worth billions. He later posted on X that a 100 million-square-foot factory could be placed in rural Texas.

The news comes on the heels of SpaceX’s impending IPO, the largest in history. Musk’s Starlink satellite and rocket production company’s value is pegged at around $1.8 trillion.

— Hunter Cooke