SpaceX has announced plans to construct a massive, 125,000-acre launch facility in Louisiana named Starbase, backed by a $100 billion investment. The company aims to begin construction in 2027 and target its first Starship flights from the site by 2029, supporting thousands of annual launches for orbital missions and data centers.
Multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has announced that it will build its largest launch site yet in the southern US state of Louisiana. SpaceX stock gained on Tuesday, closing at 137.95, up 2.95.
Investment and Infrastructure Scale at Starbase, Louisiana
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said SpaceX will invest $100 billion to build the facility, with construction starting in 2027 and the first Starship launches targeted for 2029. Musk added that Starbase will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day.
The location shares its name with another SpaceX site on the southern tip of Texas. In 2025, residents in an area of Cameron County, where the company has testing and development operations, approved incorporating the patch of land as a city called Starbase. The facility in Louisiana will be used to support thousands of Starship flights a year with missions launching to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond,
SpaceX said on Tuesday.
Economic Impact and Regional Job Projections
State economic officials anticipate that the project will transform the region into a major aerospace hub. The facility will add more than 3,000 jobs to the region, the company said. The Louisiana Economic Development agency said the average wage of workers at the base—the largest of its kind in the world—would be 192% more than the region’s current average salary. It will also create more than 8,100 new jobs indirectly, the agency estimated.
“The historic project will establish Louisiana as a global hub for next-generation aerospace, with the capacity and infrastructure needed to dramatically increase launch frequency and expand access to space,” the Louisiana Economic Development agency added.
Accelerated Timelines for Orbital Data Centers and Nvidia Integration
Alongside the physical infrastructure announcement, Musk took to X to update the timeline for launching the rocket company’s first AI-powered satellites, which would eventually depart from Starbase, Louisiana. SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028,
Musk said in a post on Monday afternoon. Musk’s post comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement that SpaceX and Nvidia would be deploying Nvidia Vera processors to accelerate the orchestration, code execution, and data processing that powers its next generation of agentic AI.
The companies have worked together in the past and earlier this year announced that Nvidia chips would power SpaceX’s upcoming AI satellites, aka orbital data centers. SpaceX in the past had said it would target 2028 for the launch of these satellites, but Musk’s new timeline pulls that forward to Q4 2027, with volume launches in 2028.
Wall Street is positioned for SpaceX to hit these timelines much later and is quite bullish on the prospects. From 2029 on, we expect SpaceX to pursue orbital compute towards ~75GW by the end of 2031 at a significantly cheaper cost than could be done on Earth,
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. We believe significant upside potential remains as the company quite literally builds out the next frontier.
Market Response and Technical Hurdles Ahead
Financial markets responded positively to the announcements, with SpaceX stock gaining on Tuesday. However, Musk has been known to issue aggressive timelines that subsequently aren’t hit. Look to past timelines for Tesla’s Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi, and the still unreleased next-gen Tesla Roadster.
A key challenge for ramping up orbital data center deployment is how SpaceX will get the payload into space. Its powerful Starship rocket is slated to carry the satellites into space, but it’s still in testing. Though the rocket had a successful test launch and release of some Starlink satellites, it still hasn’t reached the high-altitude orbit necessary for some satellite launches, and only the booster portion of the rocket has landed safely at the launch pad thus far. Nevertheless, an updated timeline for orbital data centers is good news for SpaceX investors.
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