Post caption
SpaceX will finally IPO at a record-breaking $1.5T valuation in 2026. But after famously resisting it for so long, why would Elon Musk take the company public now, especially with revenues surging into the tens of billions of dollars?
The answer is data centers… in space.
According to a long-time SpaceX employee:
“Once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall.”
That’s right – welcome to the great space race… 2.0.
Here are the other major players involved.
Google (who by the way owns ~10% of SpaceX) – plans to test its own orbital data center by 2027 and unveiled ‘Project Starcatcher’ last month in order to do so.
OpenAI has expressed interest in orbital data centers and have explored buying a stake in rocket makers.
Nvidia financed Starcloud, which just yesterday trained the first AI models from space using an Nvidia H100 GPU.
The question remains whether space-based compute is the future, or part of the AI hype train.
What do you think?
If you like this video, follow @rpn to stay two steps ahead on the incredibly disruption happening in tech and how to leverage it in content and business.
Transcript
This is big news. SpaceX is going public next year as confirmed by Elon Musk, who will become the world's first trillionaire on IPO. But nobody seems to realize the reason that this is all happening now, which is extraordinary. It has to do with what a lot of technologists are calling the most important thing in the next several years, which is data centers in space. Now, a lot of people think that this is just the latest Silicon Valley grift to keep pumping valuations, but Google, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, etcetera are all obsessed with this idea. Why? Well, AGI is considered perhaps the most important technology our species will ever invent. No, one of the main bottlenecks are computational resources. Demis Hassabis himself says AI scaling must be pushed to the maximum to get to AGI. That is where space comes in, which produces unlimited solar energy, theoretically cheaper to cool, no land laws, it doesn't hurt our environment, etcetera. SpaceX, keep in mind, has more satellites in orbit than the rest of the world combined. The bull case for SpaceX and Tesla and yes if space based compute becomes the dominant infrastructure is mind bending. The better case is if AI turns out to be hype flavored bubbleicious, they're left with hundreds of billions of dollars of unused satellites. Now, from my research, it seems for this to become technologically and worst importantly economically viable, it could take decades. As Google calls it, it's a moonshot. But regardless of it all, we can expect the SpaceX IPO to be a record breaker. Best let me know what you think. I'll see you soon. Peace.
