Musk, writing on his X social media platform, has confirmed reports that SpaceX will launch an IPO. No date for the actual IPO was given but it is understood that it will happen well within one year. It is likely to be the biggest-ever IPO in history.

SpaceX will use the money it raises in an IPO to move even faster: “It will take a lot of cash to design and build the satellites and launch the rockets to deploy data-centres in space,” stated Musk, and this would include buying the chips needed to populate the centres. Starlink is already using NVIDIA H100 GPU chips in some of its satellites.

A former staffer at SpaceX (Abhi Tripathi) said: “Once Musk realised Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data-centers, the writing was on the wall. That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. If you have followed Elon’s tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.”

SpaceX is currently putting satellite mass into orbit at a cost that is orders of magnitude lower than anyone else. Now, it seems, his aim is to girdle the planet with data-centres for the likes of Google (which is a major investor in SpaceX).

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Tags: elon musk, IPO, spacex