Andrew Fox lays out the math showing that reusable Starship launches could put AI compute into orbit for about $5B per gigawatt of CapEx, a fraction of the ~$25B per gigawatt cost of terrestrial data centers. ✦ AI generated
Andrew Fox · BG2 Pod · 2026-06-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 26:54
“But take us there on that, too.”
Launch this compute into space. And the math that you get to before you account for things like bad GPUs, bad satellites, right, these will all be things that happen. But the math you get to is it's about $5 billion per gigawatt of CapEx to put these in space.
verbatim transcript · starts at 26:54
26:54billion per gigawatt of CapEx to put these in space. >> Right. >> For comparison, terrestrially, talk about the switch gears, the generators, the transformers, the shell, getting the power, that today is about 25 20 to 25 billion per gigawatt. So we're talking about a 5x reduction in cost on half of your bill of materials >> Right. >> for the data center. >> Right. >> Which is a huge number.
27:22>> Yeah, just just very simply, I mean just to say that put it cost $60 to put a gigawatt on the ground today. And we'll call it 35 of that is are the GPUs and the silicon that's doing the training and the inference. And 25 billion is the land, the shell, the power, and the cooling. I would hypothesize that those elements are probably going to be inflationary,
27:44so that 25 billion may not go down. And because space, power, cooling are effectively free in space, and when I say space, I mean land. You know, there's no land in space, but there is space. Um you're you're talking about putting a gigawatt into space for 30 billion and having lower operating costs. Now the dynamic versus 60 billion that's inflationary, and that third and that 30 billion, that five may be deflationary
28:16over time. But what we need to consider is you know, the reliability and the maintenance. And so as long as you know, everybody can do the math, but as long as these satellites in space aren't failing at an at an astronomical rate, the math maths. As you can see, and by the way, we know GPUs melt and lasers fail. We know this happens in data centers, particularly during big training runs.
28:44And yeah, I mean GPUs melt. Um so as long as the reliability and maintenance is not dramatically lower, the math is there once we have reusability and then rapid reusability for Starship V3. >> I when you when we look at this, okay, so we we went through Starlink and we said, "Okay, like it it just stands to reason we're going to have direct to cell on Starlink." Like the assumptions there