The New Product SpaceX Is Betting Its Entire Company on: What the Market Is Missing

Global data center electricity use was around 415 terawatt hours in 2024, and it's screaming past 1,000 terawatt hours. The biggest of them, the 747-8, spans about 68 m, and this thing is bigger, and it stands about 20 m tall fully unfolded. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, said that the full AI one satellites come in late 2027 with some compute riding along on regular Starlink broadband and mobile satellites first, and volume production on Starship around 2028. An independent analyst, Mark Barra, ran the numbers separately and found a roughly 100 kW satellite shedding about 60 kW needs somewhere between 41 and 71 square meters of radiator. An engineer named Andrew McCalip built a public calculator on this and landed a roughly $51 per watt for orbital compute versus about $16 per watt on the ground. Overall, this points to specialized systems and vertically integrated players shaping what comes next far more than surface narratives suggest.

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