SpaceX wants to put data centers in orbit. And it wants to do it using the same satellite technology that already beams internet to millions of Starlink customers on the ground.
The company’s May 2026 IPO filing lays out an ambitious roadmap for deploying what it calls “AI compute satellites” in sun-synchronous orbit, with initial launches targeted for no earlier than 2028. The constellation could eventually grow to as many as one million satellites, each designed to handle AI training and inference workloads.
The IPO itself is targeting a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. The bet is that space-based AI infrastructure isn’t science fiction, it’s the next logical step in an enterprise AI market estimated at $28.5 trillion in total addressable size.
The Starlink-to-AI pipeline
Each AI satellite in the initial design would generate approximately 100 kW of power through solar arrays, paired with advanced cooling systems to manage the heat that AI workloads notoriously produce.
