The three hard-tech moonshots fueling SpaceX’s unbelievable IPO
This title could be clearer and more informative.Try out Clickbait Shieldfor free (5 uses left this month).
SpaceX is going public with a $75 billion IPO that is reportedly nearly four times oversubscribed, but independent analysts at Morningstar and NYU value the company at $825 billion and $1.2 trillion respectively — well below the bankers' $1.8 trillion figure. The gap largely reflects uncertainty around three ambitious engineering bets: fully reusable Starship rockets, a new US chip foundry called Terafab, and a rapid satellite production ramp to build orbital AI data centers at gigawatt scale. The core space launch and Starlink businesses are seen as high-margin and attractive, while the AI infrastructure play — including selling compute to Anthropic and Google and building frontier models — is considered highly speculative. Musk's stated goal of reaching 1 gigawatt of annualized space AI compute by end of next year would require roughly 556 satellites per month, about twice current Starlink production rates, from a facility not yet built.
