If there is something that Elon Musk has been repeating since before Starship was called Starship, it is that SpaceX would not go public until the gigantic Martian rocket was flying regularly. The excuse was that Wall Street likes short-term profitability plans more than multi-generational plans to colonize Mars. But the script has changed: SpaceX is preparing its jump onto the stock market, and not to pay for the trip to the red planet. He does this because he needs a lot of capital for “something more” than Starship and Starlink.
The largest IPO in the United States. As revealed by Bloomberg, SpaceX plans to launch a Public Offering for Sale at the end of 2026 or beginning of 2027. The company is seeking a valuation of 1.5 trillion dollars (trillions, on an American scale) and more than 30 billion in cash, dizzying figures that would represent the largest IPO in the history of the United States, close to the global record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019.
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Musk has been leaving breadcrumbs in X for days about this change in strategy. When the first rumors were leaked about a financing round that valued the company at 800,000 million, the tycoon denied it, clarifying that “the valuation increases depend on the progress of Starship, Starlink… and one more thing, which is possibly the most significant by far.” What is that thing that makes another round of investment insufficient?
Orbital computing. What is clear from Musk’s latest tweets is that SpaceX wants to raise a lot of cash with its IPO for more than just Starship and Starlink: to develop space data centers. The logic, which Musk himself considers valid, is the same that other companies like Google are following, but with the advantage of being the largest rocket launcher in the world.
On Earth, AI data centers have two major bottlenecks: power and cooling. In space, satellites can receive sunlight 24 hours a day without atmospheric interference and with the possibility of dissipating heat on the dark side of the satellite, eliminating Earth’s complex water and air conditioning systems.
Beyond Starlink. SpaceX already has a constellation of 9,000 satellites in orbit, many of them interconnected by laser links. The plan would be to leverage all the knowledge and technology the company has to create a new localized AI constellation: in Musk’s words, the cheapest way to generate AI “bitstreams” in less than three years.
Its roadmap is hard science fiction: scale up to adding 100 GW of capacity per year using high-bandwidth lasers connected to the already highly profitable Starlink constellation itself. And from there we move on to factories on the Moon and the use of electromagnetic rails to launch these AI satellites without the need for rockets.
The umpteenth gold rush. Figures like Sam Altman, Eric Schmidt or Jeff Bezos are already making moves to have their piece of the pie in the orbital data center business. Google has created the Suncatcher project and Nvidia is collaborating with Starcloud, while smaller startups like Aetherflux have announced projects like “Galactic Brain” planned for 2027.
The difference is that SpaceX has the launch experience and is building the largest rocket in the world, with the peculiarity that it aspires to be completely reusable.
It’s just the beginning. If 1.5 trillion is already a historical valuation, a recent report from ARK Invest projects that, by 2030, SpaceX’s enterprise value could be around $2.5 trillion in a base case scenario, driven almost entirely by Starlink’s recurring revenue and lower launch costs thanks to Starship reusability.
Going public in 2026 would not just be a financial operation: it would give SpaceX the capital it needs to become the backbone of AI computing infrastructure, turning an internet service like Starlink into something that Musk himself considers “much more significant.”
Images | SpaceX
In WorldOfSoftware | Building data centers in space was the new hot business. Elon Musk just broke it with a tweet
