Elon Musk has hinted that SpaceX is looking to go public, more than two decades after it was founded.
“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk replied on X to a post by space journalist Eric Berg saying that SpaceX would go public soon. Bloomberg and other outlets have also reported on the news, with Bloomberg saying that SpaceX would look to raise $30 billion which would value the company at $1.5 trillion. The $30 billion fundraise would make SpaceX the biggest listing of all time, edging out Saudi Aramco which had raised $29 billion in its listing.
SpaceX’s listing news comes at a time of plenty of interest in AI datacenters in space. Musk himself has said that within 5 years, the cheapest way to do AI compute would be in space, and Jeff Bezos has predicted AI datacenters in space in 20 years. Meanwhile Google has launched Project Suncatcher to launch TPUs in space by 2027. These predictions aren’t just speculation — Starcloud, a Google and NVIDIA-backed startup has already sent an NVIDIA H100 to space, and trained Nano-GPT while in orbit, making it the first LLM to be trained in space.
Building AI data centers in space offers several compelling advantages, primarily leveraging the unique environmental conditions of orbit to enhance performance and reduce operational challenges on Earth. The near-perfect vacuum and naturally cold temperatures of space can drastically improve thermal management, allowing for much more efficient cooling of high-density AI processors and potentially enabling higher clock speeds or denser computing arrays without the enormous energy and infrastructure costs associated with terrestrial cooling systems. Also, a space-based platform provides unobstructed, near-light-speed communication paths across the globe via line-of-sight satellite links, bypassing terrestrial infrastructure bottlenecks. This combination of energy efficiency, superior cooling, and global low-latency connectivity makes space a uniquely attractive, albeit expensive, frontier for the next generation of power-hungry AI computation.
And SpaceX could be uniquely poised to enable space datacenters if they become a reality. SpaceX alone launches nearly 90% of all mass from earth into orbit, and could easily help set up these space datacenters. Also, Musk-owned xAI builds datacenters to train its models, allowing for another Musk company to use these datacenters. SpaceX was anyway one of the most valuable private companies around, but the potential of these datacenters could garner plenty of interest from investors that are looking to back the ongoing AI race — and the potential of it reaching space.