Texas Gives SpaceX a $17.3 Million Grant to Expand Its Starlink Facility

The state of Texas this week provided SpaceX with a $17.3 million grant to help expand its Bastrop, Texas, Starlink facility.

“This expansion is expected to create more than 400 jobs and more than $280 million in capital investment,” Texas Governor Greb Abbott said in a statement.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell says “This grant will help continue to expand Bastrop’s manufacturing for Starlink to help connect even more people across the state and around the world with high-speed, low-latency internet.”

The money comes from the $698 million Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund, which was established through the Texas CHIPS Act of 2023. It provides “grants to state entities and institutions of higher education for semiconductor manufacturing and design projects, [as well as businesses] with an established presence within the state of Texas to encourage economic development related to semiconductor manufacturing and design.”

It’s interesting timing for the SpaceX grant. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, is currently in Washington, DC running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where his team has cut funding for various grant programs, from those that track student progress and provide affordable housing to efforts to help people with disabilities plan for life after high school.

SpaceX has received about $38 billion in federal funds, The Washington Post reports. In 2021, Musk acknowledged that NASA had “saved” SpaceX with a $1.5 billion contract. On X, he then praised “the core goodness of the American state.”

These days, his tweets are largely complaining about “massive government fraud and waste,” though DOGE has yet to provide evidence of actual fraud, just programs they don’t like.

The Bastrop facility expansion, meanwhile, will take about three years and add another 1 million square feet to the facility for a total of 1.7 million. “This will add production capability of millions of customer kits each year,” SpaceX said in an annual progress report from January. 

Once complete, it will be the largest printed circuit board and panel level packaging factory in North America. It’s currently producing about 15,000 Starlink dishes per day or about 5.5 million per year, according to a rare behind-the-scenes video SpaceX posted last week.

Output is poised to increase as SpaceX works to sell more Starlink dishes across the globe, including in its newest market, India, pending regulatory approval.

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About Michael Kan

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I’ve been working as a journalist for over 15 years—I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017.

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