SpaceX’s first orbital data center is now due to launch in the fourth quarter of 2027 — about a year earlier than the company told investors when it went public.
The company had earlier noted plans to start deploying satellites “as early as 2028” in its initial May Prospectus. Then on the company’s first earnings call on Aug. 4, Musk said launches would start next year. And on Aug. 24 he put a quarter on it: “SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028,” he wrote on X.
Must Read
SpaceX went public in June and is valued at more than $1.8 trillion, up from $7.8 billion in revenue last quarter — a price that assumes a lot goes right. And Nvidia, which reported earnings Aug. 26, is the company selling it the parts.
A Vera Rubin NVL72 hardware is a server cabinet a little taller than a refrigerator, and it’s the newest thing Nvidia sells to data centers. SpaceX wants to strip one down, bolt it to solar panels and fly it in an orbit that keeps it in sunlight nearly all the time. From there, whatever it computes comes back to Earth over the same laser links Starlink satellites use to talk to each other. The company says each satellite will draw about 250 kilowatts at peak, and it has already asked the FCC for permission to launch up to a million of them.
What SpaceX gave up when it went exclusive with Nvidia
Back in June, Musk was saying the satellite’s design could work with Nvidia’s older GB300 chips, and that SpaceX would draw up a version for Google’s TPUs as well. Two suppliers means a buyer can play one off the other on price. But on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, Musk dropped the second one.
“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” Musk said. “We’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
That is a lot to give up on a satellite that hasn’t flown, though it may not last. SpaceX and Tesla are planning a chip plant called Terafab, and SpaceX says one of the things it will make is chips for the space data centers, which would end the exclusivity once Musk’s own factory is running.
Nvidia is also a shareholder. It put money into xAI in January, and that stake became SpaceX stock when the two companies merged in February. Nvidia’s own balance sheet shows its holdings of other companies’ stock jumped from $12.9 billion in January to $42.8 billion by the end of July, though Nvidia hasn’t said how much of that is SpaceX. In other words, Nvidia sells SpaceX the racks and gets paid a second time when SpaceX’s shares go up.
What this means if Nvidia is in your 401(k)
Nvidia’s data center business brought in $89 billion in the quarter it reported Aug. 26, up 117% from a year earlier, and the company expects $108 billion in total revenue this quarter. Rubin racks are already running at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle. On top of that, Nvidia has lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise more than $500 billion over time to finance AI infrastructure, though those deals aren’t final yet.
So if you hold an index fund, you own Nvidia whether you chose it or not; it’s the largest single holding in Vanguard’s S&P 500 fund. Whatever SpaceX launches in 2028 won’t be what moves it.
Read More: Vanguard reveals what’s coming for U.S. stocks — and it could be bad news for this group of investors
At a valuation above $1.8 trillion, SpaceX’s price already counts on the orbital business arriving more or less when Musk says it will. JPMorgan, for one, is comfortable with that. Analyst Doug Anmuth told clients Aug. 25 he expects SpaceX to build toward roughly 75 gigawatts of orbital compute between 2029 and the end of 2031, “at a significantly cheaper cost than could be done on Earth.”
Now, whether it’s cheaper depends on what it costs to put a kilogram in orbit, and no one has proven that number yet. Bain estimated in July that the math only works once a launch costs $50 to $100 per kilogram, against roughly $600 for a Falcon 9 today. Radiation is a problem on top of that. A stray particle can flip a bit inside a processor, and the finer the circuitry, the easier that gets. Rubin’s circuitry is about as fine as Nvidia makes, and no one has run a rack this size in orbit long enough to know how often it will happen.
3 dates to watch in 2027
SpaceX’s schedule now has a test satellite going up early in 2027, factory production starting later in the year and the first working launch in the fourth quarter. As for Musk’s track record on dates, he first showed the Tesla Roadster in 2017 and it still hasn’t shipped, and the Cybertruck and the Semi both arrived years behind his original dates. So you may want to write each of those in pencil.
His Aug. 24 post said the space version of the rack is “significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack.” But he didn’t say what one costs.
Moneywise requested comments from the SpaceX team but had not received a response by publication time.
What To Read Next
Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise’s best stories and exclusive interviews first — clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Elon Musk is about to launch an Nvidia data center into orbit — and he’s betting everything on its chips
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
