Once Starship achieves rapid reusability, launching AI compute into orbit will cost roughly $5 billion per gigawatt of CapEx, versus $20-25 billion per gigawatt for terrestrial data center build-out today.
Using specs from Elon Musk's satellite reveal, the speaker calculates that launching AI compute into space could cost about $5B/gigawatt versus $20-25B/gigawatt terrestrially, a roughly 5x reduction on half the data center bill of materials. ✦ AI generated
Clark Tang · BG2 Pod · 2026-06-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 26:54
“Walk us through the economic case.”
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. For comparison, terrestrially... that today is about 20 to 25 billion per gigawatt.
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