SpaceX is going all in on AI data centers in space — and the company kicked off its IPO week with a sneak peek.
In an interview with a SpaceX employee uploaded onto X on Monday, Elon Musk revealed the most detailed look yet at the AI satellite the company is planning to launch into space in droves.
According to the specs shared by SpaceX, the AI data center will be 20 meters tall and have a wingspan of 70 meters, making it the largest satellite the rocket firm has launched to date.
Musk described it as “a draft version of version one” of SpaceX’s orbital data center, and the satellite consists of a rack of AI chips supported by huge solar panels and liquid radiators.
The billionaire said the design was “much simpler” than the company’s Starlink satellite, which SpaceX has been launching into space since 2019, and would rely mostly on technology developed for SpaceX’s satellite internet service.
“We don’t think this is a super hard problem, compared to things we already do,” said Musk.
The massive solar panels will be built at a new factory in Bastrop, Texas, where SpaceX already makes Starlink components. Musk said the “Gigasat” factory, which spans more than 11 million square feet, is under construction and will be operating at “some reasonable volume” by the end of next year.
Musk has long been an advocate of using orbital data centers to train and run powerful AI models, arguing that AI satellites can take advantage of plentiful solar energy and avoid the public backlash that has embroiled many new data center projects.
SpaceX has indicated it plans to launch as many as one million AI data centers, and the massive expansion of orbital compute is a major part of the company’s pitch to investors as it gears up to go public at a $1.75 trillion valuation this week.
In investor filings, SpaceX has justified that valuation by arguing it has a total addressable market worth $28.5 trillion, of which AI accounts for $26.5 trillion.
In a separate interview on Monday, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnson said SpaceX’s AI data centers would use Nvidia GPUs.
The orbital platforms will also eventually use specialized radiation-hardened chips built by Terafab, the massive semiconductor fab that SpaceX is building with Tesla and Intel.
Musk said on Monday that the Terafab facility would likely be around 10 million square feet, roughly 10 times the size of Tesla’s largest factory in Austin.
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