Baker, speaking to CNBC on Friday, said a severe global compute shortage is “growing more severe by the day,” making the case for space-based infrastructure increasingly urgent.
Baker estimated that SpaceX’s Starship, once reusable, would bring launch costs to roughly $5 billion per gigawatt, putting orbital compute at around $30 billion per gigawatt versus $60 billion on Earth.
He argued that power, cooling, land, and infrastructure account for roughly $25 billion of a terrestrial gigawatt-scale build and are simply not needed in space. “It costs 30 billion to put a gigawatt of compute in space relative to 60 billion here on Earth,” he said. Repair and maintenance, he acknowledged, remain an open challenge for SpaceX to work through.
He also flagged three milestones for investors to track: terrestrial gigawatt capacity expansion, Starlink V3 deployment via reusable Starship, and orbital compute activation.
On this front, SpaceX executives told investors ahead of the offering that initial orbital compute demonstrations could come as early as late 2027, ahead of the 2028 timeline disclosed in its IPO documents.
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