Does SpaceX have the wherewithal to put AI data centers in space?

00:00 Speaker A Do you think that you’ll get into SpaceX this Friday? Will you wait it out or are you just plain waiting for OpenAI and Anthropic to go public? 00:15 Speaker B Yeah, we’re going to we’re going to wait this one out. I think particular with SpaceX. Uh there’s just a lot…


Does SpaceX have the wherewithal to put AI data centers in space?

00:00 Speaker A

Do you think that you’ll get into SpaceX this Friday? Will you wait it out or are you just plain waiting for OpenAI and Anthropic to go public?

00:15 Speaker B

Yeah, we’re going to we’re going to wait this one out. I think particular with SpaceX. Uh there’s just a lot uh focused on uh what will come and I think there’s a lot of variables that that we’re just not comfortable with right now. Uh as you kind of mentioned at the beginning, there’s going to be a lot of new issuance to to digest including Alphabet’s equity uh raise. So, you know, I think it’s really questionable about uh how much the market can absorb. I know there’s just tons of cash supposedly on the sidelines, uh but it’s been on the sidelines for a while and they could have been invested in other things and uh so I I’m not so certain that that capital is allocated uh to something like a SpaceX IPO. So I think this is one for us that that we’ll kind of wait and see.

01:08 Speaker C

SpaceX is a long-term bet. This is a long runway here.

01:13 Speaker C

Space is uh literally a new frontier that we are trying to get into here. And Elon Musk is proposing data centers in space. I don’t know if he’s the first person to do it, but he’s probably the first person who can do it at scale.

01:29 Speaker C

That is a very ambitious undertaking. Now, it’s important to think of what SpaceX actually does and what they’re what they do is spelled out in their prospectus and where they think say see things going. So, they’re looking at something called TAM, which is Total Addressable Market. And they’re really thinking more about AI than they are space. And uh although space is going to be a vehicle because when you think about AI infrastructure, you need data centers. Well, data centers in space does a lot in that regard. So, here’s what he said uh just the other day. This is not some magic that’s required.

02:11 Speaker C

Um it’s not that hard. A lot of this technology we’ve already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. We don’t think this is a super hard problem compared to the things that we already do.

02:22 Speaker C

Now there’s a lot to be done. Uh we haven’t done this at scale yet, but arguably they’ve already got the infrastructure in place with Starlink. Um to put a data in center in space, it it might even be a little bit simpler in certain respects because you don’t need all the big antenna arrays. But there’s a lot of problems to solve. Um you’ve got to have power at scale, you’ve got maintenance, how are you going to do that? A lot of that has to be automated. There’s space debris.

02:47 Speaker C

There’s a lot of garbage floating around up there, things that have exploded and just uh things flying from all over at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. So, there are a lot of problems here, but I think it’s important to realize that SpaceX sees itself as an AI infrastructure with respect to its long-term bets. and anything that Elon Musk is doing is inherently a long-term bet.

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