Cathie Wood says SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) had no need for public markets as long as Starlink kept generating cash. Elon Musk’s push into orbital AI data centers changed that.
"I never thought SpaceX would go public," the ARK Invest CEO told Livewire. " "He needs so much capital," Wood said.
" The Numbers Behind Wood’s Argument SpaceX’s financials help explain her thinking. 36 billion.
The equation changed further when SpaceX acquired Musk’s xAI in February, bringing the Grok developer and its expensive data-center buildout inside SpaceX. 7 billion in its June IPO and told investors the proceeds would help fund AI compute infrastructure alongside launch systems and satellite capacity.
83 billion in the second quarter, about 86% of total quarterly capex, according to company filings. SpaceX has not said orbital data centers were the reason for the IPO, but the company’s spending shows how sharply AI changed its capital needs.
Can Orbit Solve AI’s Data Center Problem? SpaceX argues orbital computing could avoid some constraints facing terrestrial AI data centers, including access to electricity, land, cooling water and increasingly restrictive permitting and regulation, by tapping solar energy in orbit.
The economics, however, depend heavily on Starship making it cheap enough to launch enormous amounts of computing hardware. Microsoft Corp.
(NASDAQ:MSFT) offers a useful warning. Its Project Natick was a technical success: Microsoft said servers in its underwater data center failed at just one-eighth the rate of a comparable land-based system.
But Microsoft never scaled Natick into a commercial business. Customers preferred conventional data centers that were cheaper and easier to expand and upgrade, while the sealed design made replacing rapidly improving AI chips difficult, people familiar with the project told Reuters.
Prediction traders remain skeptical about how quickly the concept can reach meaningful scale. Kalshi puts the chance of a 1-megawatt orbital data center going live before 2031 at 30%, with $46,000 traded on the market.
Musk is pushing a much faster timetable. He said he is "highly confident" SpaceX will launch AI computers from Nvidia Corp.
(NASDAQ:NVDA) into orbit in 2027, with "significant" scale expected in 2028. Image: Shutterstock Kalshi and Benzinga have an existing data collaboration agreement.
