After spending nearly $16 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure in the second quarter, Elon Musk used SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday to explain why he believes SpaceX is uniquely positioned to dominate the AI compute race: rocket scientists.
Defending the company’s aggressive investment in AI, Musk argued that the engineering expertise required to design reusable rockets and satellites translates directly to building AI data centers, comparing the company’s advantage in the market to “the New York Yankees going in and playing a Little League team.”
Data centers are a “trivial problem” compared to what SpaceX’s rocket engineers work on every day, Musk said.
“We’re taking a small amount of the expertise that we use for rockets and satellites, and applying that to scaling terrestrial data centers,” he said, arguing that even a fraction of SpaceX’s aerospace engineering experience produces “an amazing outcome” when applied to AI infrastructure.
Musk made the boast without naming any of his “little league” rivals. SpaceX is a relative newcomer to the data center business, an industry long dominated by the giant cloud services providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet-owned Google. All three of those business reported record growth in their cloud divisions for their most recent earnings reports. A growing crop of “neocloud” startups are also racing to build the data centers and computing capacity needed to power artificial intelligence.
