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SpaceX begins assembling Starbase’s biggest manufacturing building yet
It might not look like much today but SpaceX has begun assembling what is set to become Starbase’s largest Starship manufacturing facility.
The structure, which has generally come to be known as Starbase’s ‘wide bay,’ was first teased by CEO Elon Musk in July 2021 and will be the fourth permanent assembly ‘bay’ constructed at Starbase – currently SpaceX’s sole dedicated Starship factory. The first, now known simply as the windbreak, is a triangular bay built in 2019 that is mostly unused but occasionally supports work on Starship nose assembly. Next, SpaceX built a larger ‘mid bay’ in the first quarter of 2020, out of which every Starship prototype and test tank since SN3 has been built.
A few months after the midbay was finished, SpaceX began constructing an even larger ‘high bay’ around 81 meters (265 ft) tall and 30 by 25 meters (100 by 80 ft) wide – about twice as tall and with twice the area, in other words. While the midbay was specifically optimized for assembling one or two Starship tank sections at a time, the high bay was designed to be large enough to fully assemble one Super Heavy booster (69m/225ft tall) and stack a Starship tank and nose section (50m/165ft tall) at the same time. The goal of SpaceX’s new ‘wide bay’ may be even loftier still.
Though SpaceX’s pace of Starship and Super Heavy assembly and processing appears to have slowed down significantly in the last few months, the company has still proven with Starships SN4-6, SN8-SN11, and SN15-16 that it can build large numbers of suborbital prototypes at the frankly incredible pace of 1-2 per month. With Super Heavy BN1, BN3, and BN3, SpaceX – to a lesser degree – has also demonstrated respectable booster prototype production, though none have flown and only one has completed any testing.
Nonetheless, as SpaceX works to complete Starship S21 and Super Heavy B5 and prepares to begin assembling S22 and B6 while Ship 20 and Booster 4 still sit – largely untested – at the launch site, Starbase’s existing production capabilities are already starting to outstretch its two main assembly bays. In other words, the purpose of SpaceX’s new ‘wide bay’ is almost certainly to double, triple, or even quadruple Starbase’s maximum vehicle production rate.
The wide bay’s dimensions have yet to be officially confirmed but based on aerial views of its foundation, it will measure roughly 50m (~165′) wide, 35m (~115′) deep, and 90-100m (~300-330′) tall, giving it more than twice as much usable floor space as the high bay. In theory, the high bay has enough space for SpaceX to stack 3-4 four Starship or Super Heavy tank sections at once. With more than twice the floor space, the wide bay should singlehandedly allow SpaceX to assemble 3-4 Super Heavy boosters, 4-8 Starships, or 2-3 boosters and 2-3 Starships at once.
At the absolute minimum, once fully outfitted, that means it could roughly triple the number of boosters or ships Starbase can fully assemble each month. Pictured below, there’s also a small but not insignificant amount of evidence (the small rectangles left of the wide bay foundation, bottom right, in the photo above) that SpaceX is completing additional foundation work that could double the wide bay’s floor space yet again. The second 50x35m structure those foundations seem to outline could be a wider midbay, a few-story ring assembly floor to augment Starbase’s tents, a 50x70m ‘high bay,’ or simply a more permanent space for general offices, workshops, storage, and other miscellaneous uses.
Stay tuned for updates on the massive structure’s construction.
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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.
SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
