SpaceX is building one of the largest artificial intelligence supercomputers in the world, and it is doing so at a pace that has surprised even the analysts who follow the company closely.
The basic unit here is computing power, measured in gigawatts (GW), which refers to the electricity needed to run the machines rather than their raw processing speed. More power means more computers running, which means more AI work gets done.
At the start of the year, SpaceX expected to have 2.5 to 3GW of this capacity up and running by the end of 2027.
According to a UBS note published after the latest results, it has now raised that target to 13GW, with Elon Musk saying it could reach 20GW if enough power generation is available. To put that in context, the company currently has 1.7GW running, so it is planning to roughly multiply that by eight in little more than a year.
The reason for the rush is demand
Every major cloud computing company in the world, the Googles and Microsofts of this world, has been pressing SpaceX to let them rent its computing capacity.
Musk says SpaceX could sell out several times what it currently has. When that kind of demand exists, you build as fast as you can.
However, cost is an issue as getting to 13GW will require SpaceX to spend roughly $350 billion on hardware and infrastructure, according to UBS's research.
Just in the final three months of this year, the company plans to spend $35 to $40 billion, which is roughly what some mid-sized countries spend on defence annually.
Hourly contracts
To cover those costs, SpaceX is charging customers to rent the computers by the hour or by contract. Prices are already rising, and Musk expects them to keep going up. If that holds, the company calculates it could earn back the cost of each new installation in as little as six months, which is an exceptionally fast return on capital of that scale.
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The end goal is a business generating between $500 billion and $1 trillion in annual recurring revenue by end 2027, purely from renting AI computing power. For reference, the entire revenue of Apple in its most recent full year was around $385 billion.
SpaceX is also planning to take some of this computing into space itself, running servers on satellites in orbit. That remains a longer-term project, but it is already appearing in financial forecasts for 2027 and 2028, which signals analysts are starting to treat it as a real business rather than a concept.
