Gavin Baker: Physics PhDs dismissing orbital data centers haven't out-thought SpaceX engineers
GavinSBaker · x · 2026-08-31
Investor Gavin Baker pushes back on physicists claiming orbital data centers are impossible: several PhDs concluded 'never work' after a few hours of thought, while 10,000 SpaceX engineers treat it as solved — one skeptical investor friend admitted 'I was wrong' after meeting SpaceX engineers.
Notes from his interview add market context: AI names fell 50–60% in a month, yet his Silicon Valley digging found no negative metric — GPU availability, rental pricing, DRAM spot prices and token growth all accelerating. One startup rented thousands of B200s at $2/GPU-hour and expects to pay just under $4 for the same cluster seven months later. Hyperscaler operating cash flow margins at Microsoft, Meta and Amazon hit 28–32% last quarter. He argues the installed compute base is about to reprice higher.
Related event: Musk and Investors Push Back on Space Data Center Skepticism(4 posts)→
More from Infra
- RL train-sample systems are frontier AI's hardest infra problem — and a trade secret — brianryhuang · 2026-10-16
- Local tuning of GLM-5.3-Flash on 2×GB10 lifts decode from 49 to 58 tok/s — EAccelerate_42 · 2026-10-16
- 3x DGX Spark cluster runs GLM-5.3-Flash locally behind a proxy, 1.75M tokens/day at 119W — Teknium · 2026-10-16
- Optuna creator Akiba: when 2 hyperparameters cost $20M, what's left for BO/HPO — Stefania_druga · 2026-10-16
- Amazon Proposes Per-Request Validated Evidence Caching for Production RAG — _reachsumit · 2026-10-16
- LinkedIn's TransX report: sequence transduction for recsys, +6.02% CTR in A/B tests — _reachsumit · 2026-10-16