I think the only moat in the future will be the scale of hardware deployment. If one company is able to deploy an order of magnitude more silicon, they'll have a firm grip on a SOTA model and massive inference usage.

China or SpaceX seem like the 2 likely candidates in 5 years, but who knows.

▲ GMoromisato 7 hours ago | parent [-]

"Who knows" is the right answer, I think.

If (a) demand for AI continues to increase, and (b) SpaceX can get to ~$100/kg to orbit, then they will have a ridiculously deep moat. Probably more like 10 years, though.

But as you said, who knows.

▲ t0mas88 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They will have moat in the satellite launching business, which is not useful in the AI datacenter market.

You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues.

The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the IPO. That's all. There is no engineering reason.

▲ GMoromisato 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yours is the only valid argument. If space datacenters are not competitive with terrestrial (in terms of megatokens/$ or whatever), then they will never work and SpaceX will fail. That's the whole ball game.

But anyone who thinks they can predict those prices in ten years is wildly overconfident.

▲ qlte 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

  > then they will never work and SpaceX will fail

Or, Elon pulls his classic narrative sleight of hand for like the 9th time and announces SpaceXesla is NOT a car, battery, solar, self-driving, robot, space launch, space datacenter, or AI company but now completely pivoting the business to [INSERT NEXT BIG THING] that will 100x the company in 6 months maybe, 6 years definitely.

Space Datacenters eventually get quietly discontinued after finally killing the zombie brand at which point the only reaction is "huh, remember that?"

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/teslas-solar-roof-is-dead-...

	▲	GMoromisato 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are you saying that if space datacenters fail then SpaceX stock will go up? Then it sounds like you should invest a lot of money in them.

▲ cameronh90 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not an engineering bet.

Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).

▲

porkpieshoe 6 hours ago | parent [-]

So to be clear, the prediction is that every single location on earth will be economically infeasible due to politics, and that these same politics will have no impact on the launch or satellite businesses?

GMAFB.

It's stock pump bullshit from a guy who has figured out how to extract the maximum from stock markets.

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Rover222 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Meanwhile Nvidia just announced a space-optimized Vera Rubin designed with SpaceX designed for orbital datacenters.

But yeah, I'm sure you people with Elon Derangement Syndrome actually have it all figured out /s

https://x.com/nvidia/status/2091920680317046847

	▲	magicalist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Meanwhile Nvidia just announced a space-optimized Vera Rubin designed with SpaceX designed for orbital datacenters. well, no, they announced the concept of a space-optimized Vera Rubin designed with SpaceX: > NVIDIA and SpaceXAI are working to adapt that foundation to the requirements of orbital computing while preserving a common NVIDIA architecture and software ecosystem. The press release is really announcing that SpaceX's terrestrial data centres are going to use Vera Rubin. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spacexai-adopts-nvidia-ve...

▲ chasd00 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg

if you can't put them outside of Amarillo Texas without people throwing a fit then you can't put them anywhere. I mean freaking Pantex is there ffs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex

▲ noja 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Any cooling issues to be resolved?

	▲	GMoromisato 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. Cooling is probably the easiest problem to solve, easier than power. And in both cases, the problem is solved by mass to orbit. All you need for cooling is a big f-ing radiator. Solar panels are chips, and not trivial to manufacture. But a radiator is just a hunk of metal with some pipes. That's why the cost of mass to orbit is the most important thing. You can solve almost any space problem by just throwing more mass at it.

▲ Rover222 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, very hard to predict the future at this point. But the Starship + Terrafab combo will be this type of order-of-magnitude-moat IF it works out. Big if.

If it doesn't work out, I think China's exponential terrestrial energy deployment will eventually give them the lead, IF they can get enough chips. Another big if.