Starship Changes the Economics of AI Infrastructure
Terrestrial AI data centers are increasingly running into hard constraints on power, land use, and regulation.
Starship’s target economics (<$250/kg to orbit) could make orbital data centers viable at roughly $33B per GW versus $50-60B on the ground. Our rough math points to ~50% IRR and ~$50B present value per gigawatt deployed in space.
Our base case reaches ~$17-20T enterprise value by around 2040 versus roughly $2.1T today. Getting from here to that level would require average annualized returns in the 16-17% range — ambitious, but not unrealistic if execution remains strong.
The hardware side is also closer than many assume. Starlink V3 satellites are already operating at power levels approaching rack density, and the constellation has demonstrated very high reliability in orbit.
The primary constraint remains launch cadence and orbital capacity rather than fundamental technology.
Orbital Inc files for 100,000 LEO data center satellites after emerging from stealth earlier this month.
Los Angeles-based Orbital Inc submitted FCC plans targeting 10 gigawatts of orbital compute power, with a demonstration mission planned for next year and its first purpose-built satellite, Orbital-1, slated for 2028. The company announced a $5 million pre-seed round earlier this month, led by a16z @speedrun and with participation from @BasisSet , @AntlerGlobal , @AntiFund , and more.
The WNBA left Caitlin Clark off their 30th anniversary poster. We have truly never seen anything like this. The league got a golden goose and is doing everything they can to kill her.
Never has a photo so completely encapsulated the total and complete failure of the @wnba’s leadership.
Never in the history of sports has a golden goose been so deliberately squandered.
This is what the real concentration camps did, led by the Bolshevik Jews aka the Red Terror.
Here they made actual gloves from human skin by boiling prisoners hands until the skin blistered and peeled off.
They are literally everything they said the Nazis were, but weren’t.
BREAKING: New Hampshire’s first transgender elected Rep., Stacie Laughton (D), sentenced to 33 YEARS in prison for the s*xual exploitation of children.
Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.
https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4
This is approximately a million times worse than Epstein. It’s not even remotely close. The scale. The nature of the crimes. The powerful institutions implicated. And yet something tells me that many of the Epstein obsessives will have nothing at all to say about this.