SpaceX will already be earning more from digital technologies next month than from all of its other businesses combined. The company’s founder said this in an address to employees. Within a few years, this sector is expected to determine almost the entire value of the business. The plans extend as far as factories on the Moon and spacecraft operating in orbit as computing platforms.
Betting on Computing
SpaceX shared a 29-minute recording of the speech on the social network X on August 11, Space.com reports. The company currently has 1.4 gigawatts of computing capacity and sells this resource to technology corporations and laboratories.
By the end of next year, the figure is expected to reach 10 gigawatts. According to Elon Musk’s estimate, the value of one watt will range from $30 to $50.
This is where the projected annual revenue of $300 billion to $500 billion comes from — figures he described as very large. For comparison, 10 gigawatts exceeds the combined capacity of the three nuclear power plants currently operating in Ukraine.
Factories and Satellites
The Terafab complex is expected to be built in Texas as a joint project with Tesla for the production of general-purpose semiconductor chips. One million Starmind spacecraft are planned for deployment into low Earth orbit using Starship, which is still under development.
The next step in the plans is manufacturing directly on the Moon. Factories are expected to operate on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite, assembling orbital data centers, which would then be launched into space using electromagnetic accelerators operating on the principle of powerful railguns.
Market Estimates
In documents filed ahead of its record-breaking public offering, the company estimated its total addressable market at $28.5 trillion. Nearly $23 trillion of that amount is attributed to artificial intelligence. These figures can be compared with the gross domestic product of the United States, which amounted to about $30.8 trillion last year.
Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired xAI, which Elon Musk founded in 2023. Along with the startup, the Grok chatbot and the Colossus supercomputer cluster in Tennessee became part of the company.
The address came one week after the company released its first quarterly report as a public company. At that time, Elon Musk also said that within four or five years, artificial intelligence would account for 99% of the business’s value.
A Promise to Employees
Money, he emphasized, is not the only motivation. What matters is creating a system that cares about humanity and helps it reach other planets and star systems, with software playing a role no less important than hardware.
At the end of the speech, Musk made a specific promise. Every SpaceX employee who wants to visit the Moon or Mars will be able to do so.
