I have not one but two wild — and interconnected — SpaceX items for you today.
The first is that CEO and founder Elon Musk just announced an exclusive partnership with AI chip giant Nvidia for the company's planned orbital data centers — and that SpaceX won't waste any time getting them into orbit.
"SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system/platform for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028," Musk posted to X on Monday. If you just have to know, Vera Rubin NVL72 is Nvidia's latest and greatest AI server, and now it's optimized to bring that performance to space.
Musk described the servers as "significantly simpler, lower cost, denser, and lighter than a traditional rack."
And that brings us to today's second item: the 130,000 or so acres of marshland the company reportedly bought from ExxonMobil on the Louisiana coast.
Rumors began swirling last spring that SpaceX was buying up land near Pecan Island on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, and today Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to hold an event in Abbeville for a “major economic development announcement.” Some of the locals aren't happy with whatever is going on, as detailed in this Fox8 Live local news report.
But why?
Space analyst Ozan Bellik theorized back in May, when the rumors got going, that "You don't need a logistics hub in Louisiana to transport Starships between Texas and Florida. Especially not one that's 136,000 acres."
He added that the site and that much land do make sense for "[a] launch site, natural gas production, and solar power for air separators and condensers. Preferably all three."
A really big launch site, for reasons I'll show you now.
According to a MarketWatch report on Monday, research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that "a one-gigawatt orbital data center would cost $170 billion, more than triple the cost of a traditional data center. But costs are expected to come down over time as rocket launches also become cheaper."
That's just the construction and launch costs, but there is more to it than just those two items.
Being in orbit means being out of local regulatory reach, which streamlines — well, everything. Bernie Sanders (CPUSA-Vt. Oblast) can shake his fist at the sky all he wants, but that won't stop any data center construction in Low Earth Orbit.
More importantly, data centers, as you well know, consume massive amounts of electricity, but in space, electrical power costs nothing more than the price of the solar panels.
But what if there was a way to drive power costs even lower?
If SpaceX were to launch its Starmind — good name, right? — into a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit (day-night boundary), each satellite would receive direct sunlight almost continuously. That greatly reduces the need for expensive (and heavy!) battery capacity, while also reducing stressful thermal cycling on the satellites.
Since Wood Mackenzie's report didn't mention polar orbits, the firm might have overestimated Starmind's production and launch costs.
Here's the problem: Neither Starbase in Texas nor Cape Canaveral in Florida is ideally suited to polar orbit launches.
But the Louisiana coast is. Launching nearly due south from there keeps the rocket over open water and away from population centers for long distances, unlike trying to do the same from Starbase or the Cape.
If SpaceX is serious about putting 100 gigawatts of AI compute into LEO annually — and it is — the company needs a huge launch center ideally located for polar launches. The Louisiana coast fits the bill.
We'll know more later, so stay tuned.
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