Wall Street pegs orbital data centers at up to $170B per GW; SpaceX camp says models repeat Starlink mistakes
elonmusk · x · 2026-09-20
TeslaLarry rounds up Street estimates for orbital data centers: Wood Mac $170B/GW, BofA $160-180B/GW, Futurum $72B for infrastructure alone, BNP >$100B just to launch 1 GW. He argues these are the same spreadsheet genre that "proved" Starlink couldn't work: Starlink succeeded because Falcon 9's real cost ran far below list price and V2/V3 satellites outran early bandwidth assumptions. AI satellites will rhyme — Gen-2/3 hardware (better chips, power, thermal per kg) will pull away from the models, with Starship collapsing launch costs.
More from Infra
- Activist evicted in 2024 puts $5B Maryland AI data center on hold — ATTlKA · 2026-11-12
- Agent Substrate Calculator Estimates Session Resume Speed Under Load — pjausovec · 2026-11-12
- Dell expands AI Data Platform: agents have a data-context problem, not a model problem — DavidLinthicum · 2026-11-12
- SGLang Megakernel Pushes Muse Spark to 1,109 tok/s, 2.1x Over Baseline — hsu_byron · 2026-11-12
- Potion UI's local login system turns your PC into a multi-user AI server — cocktailpeanut · 2026-11-12
- AWS Finally Built Its Own AWS Emulator — super_linear · 2026-11-12