Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is weeks from filing its IPO prospectus, and one of the ideas the company has been pitching is putting AI data centers in space. <\/p>\n
A new Wall Street Journal video explored the feasibility of a scheme SpaceX\u2019s own pre-IPO filing reportedly warns \u201cmay not achieve commercial viability.\u201d<\/p>\n
SpaceX asked the FCC in late January to authorize up to one million solar-powered satellites for what it calls the \u201cOrbital Data Center System,\u201d framing the project as a \u201cfirst step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization.\u201d <\/p>\n
Why The Pitch Matters<\/p>\n
NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran valued SpaceX at<\/a> $1.2 trillion in late April, a third below the $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion range the company is reportedly targeting for its IPO. <\/p>\n His base case was built on Starlink, the launch business, and xAI. Orbital data centers, if they work, could push the valuation well past that.<\/p>\n Musk called space-based AI a \u201cno-brainer\u201d at Davos in January and predicted on Dwarkesh Patel\u2019s podcast that orbital compute would beat terrestrial on cost within 30 months. <\/p>\n What It Would Actually Take<\/p>\n A Wall Street Journal video<\/a> walked through the engineering with a computer architect. <\/p>\n The benefits of going orbital are real: near-constant solar exposure in sun-synchronous orbits, no water or land demands, and solar panels that work five times as efficiently as on Earth, per Musk.<\/p>\n The drawbacks are bigger. Cooling cannot use air or water, so heat has to dissipate through heavy closed-loop radiator panels that bleed infrared into the vacuum.<\/p>\n Radiation is the second problem. A single high-energy particle striking a GPU can flip a bit and turn the right answer into the wrong one, forcing mitigations like error correction, running the same compute across three separate GPUs, or physical shielding.<\/p>\n Latency is the third problem: queries have to round-trip to orbit and back, and bandwidth limits would force satellites to be preloaded with training data rather than streamed from Earth.<\/p>\n Musk says that the project would need 10,000 Starship launches per year. SpaceX flew 165 missions in 2025, almost entirely on Falcon 9, a smaller vehicle, and Starship still has not completed a fully reusable test flight.<\/p>\n What Prediction Markets Say<\/p>\n Polymarket gives SpaceX a 91% chance<\/a> of going public by August 31, and prices<\/a> a closing market cap above $2 trillion at 59%. <\/p>\n Morgan Stanley leads underwriter odds<\/a> at 47%, and the new space ticker is expected<\/a> to list on NASDAQ.<\/p>\n For investors who can\u2019t wait for the June listing, Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:<\/a>TSLA<\/a>) remains the cleanest public proxy on the Musk trade. <\/p>\n Image: Shutterstock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is weeks from filing its IPO prospectus, and one of the ideas the company has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[1638,3041,213,202,203,212,35065,13533,222],"class_list":{"0":"post-58338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-elon-musk","8":"tag-category-markets","9":"tag-category-prediction-markets","10":"tag-cms-wordpress","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-musk","13":"tag-pageisbzpro-bz","14":"tag-symbol-rklb","15":"tag-symbol-sats","16":"tag-symbol-tsla"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116523636425520627","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}