"Super intelligence leads to abundance."
Elon Musk posted that last night, and he attached a real example from Cochise County, Arizona.
High desert. Cattle country. A small town called Willcox about 13 miles from the site.
SpaceX wants to build one of the largest AI data centers in America there, up to $50 billion of investment and around 6 gigawatts at full build-out.
Frank Antenori, chairman of the county board, ran the numbers in a live Q&A.
Arizona caps how much a county can spend. When revenue goes past that limit, the law sends the extra back to taxpayers.
His words: "We could be reducing property taxes across the board in Cochise County, the entire county, by 20%."
That includes every resident who came to the meeting to oppose it.
He also said the construction sales tax alone could pay off the county jail in 2 to 3 years instead of 13 to 20.
What about the water? SpaceX plans to dry-cool the campus with air. No groundwater pumped for industrial use. At full build-out, total water use would be roughly what 20 to 30 Arizona homes use.
Add $3.6 billion in grid upgrades and about 1,000 permanent jobs.
At the Baron conference in New York, Elon Musk said the opposition to data centers mostly comes from places that don't have one yet.
"Memphis is booming because of SpaceX. The restaurants are full, the hotels are full."
The owner of a diner in Memphis can tell you that better than any op-ed.
For a hundred years, a big factory meant a steel town or a car town. What SpaceX is building in places like Memphis and Cochise County is a new kind of industry: quiet buildings full of chips that turn electricity into intelligence, and in this case, into a lower tax bill for the whole county.
The public hearing in Cochise County is on December 9. I hope they say yes.