SoftBank’s CEO isn’t the only one with questions about Elon Musk’s orbital data center hype

Not everyone is buying Elon Musk’s vision for orbital data centers. 

Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Softbank, argued at a recent shareholder meeting that building data centers in space won’t do much to cut costs and will take too long when “in the battle for AI, the next few years will be far more important than what might happen a decade or so from now.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed Son’s remarks as part of a broader discussion that included OpenAI’s plans for custom chips, chipmaker Groq’s new $650 million funding, and much more.

Kirsten noted that it’s “very ironic” that Son is playing the skeptic here, given SoftBank’s “long history of wild bets.”

Sean, meanwhile, said that when Musk talks about “making a constellation of satellites — satellites that need to be replaced every few years as well —  to make up an ‘orbital data center,’” he’s just “guaranteeing that much more business” for SpaceX.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: Listen, neo-clouds are the new oil, and everybody who wants to make money is pivoting to a neo-cloud. I’m proud to announce that TechCrunch is now a neo-cloud, give us all your money.

I mean, this is the thing you do. It seems like there are so many players that are compute constrained, so anybody who has a shot at being able to lease out that compute is taking it, whether that’s Groq, a company that was semi-hollowed out by Nvidia, or Allbirds, which went into bankruptcy and and emerged from it as a new neo-cloud provider instead of selling shoes — Tim Fernholz did an interview with the new CEO of of that new effort that I would definitely recommend people go read. 

Or whether you’re SpaceX, where your idea was: I’m gonna build an AI platform that’s gonna have an addressable market the size of U.S. GDP, but before we get there, we’ll just rent out our compute.  And we saw this continue to happen with SpaceX, where it’s not as big as the deals that they’ve struck with Google or Anthropic, but they just signed another deal, [their] first post IPO deal, to rent out compute to another smaller player. They’re continuing down that road. 

You know, I can see this being a business for Groq in the near term. The question with all of these is how durable is it in the long term.

Anthony Ha: If we’re talking about SpaceX and their AI business and data center business, we also have to talk about these comments that Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, made recently, where he basically said: What is the point of data centers in space? Which is a question we’ve asked on this show. 

And it speaks to, again, this sense in the industry of being really, really compute constrained — they need to build as many data centers as possible, [and] there’s all kinds of reasons why that is proving to be challenging here on Earth, so maybe space is the answer. But I think Son makes some pretty fair points about: All this stuff we’re talking about, even if it all works — and the costs are going to be very, very serious to make it work — this is not happening for years and years and years, so this is not a solution to any immediate problem, as far the current need for data centers goes.

Kirsten Korosec: I just want to point out that SoftBank has a long history of making wild bets. I think it says something when Son comes up and asks the question that a lot of people have asked. 

I mean, there are a lot of VCs and founders [who] have been swept up into the idea of orbital data centers and it seems like suddenly everyone’s on board. When just a couple of years ago, I think, if someone had mentioned that, it would get slapped down a little bit. So I do think it’s an important part of the process that someone who has a pretty high profile is asking that question. But it is very ironic to me that he is the one asking it, because if you look at his pitch deck, they’ve thrown a lot of money at some pretty bold ideas.

Sean: WeWork! Listen, we’re going to be saying this for a lot over the next couple years. The idea of putting these things in space is going to be an interesting engineering challenge and certainly an interesting economic challenge. 

Anthony, what you said is definitely right to a certain extent. Elon Musk is a person who hates red tape and you know, there are no NIMBYs in space so of course he’s going to try and do that. 

To me, it comes down to: The business as it stands now for SpaceX, especially its launch business, is just overwhelmingly reliant on Starlink. The reason that they are 80 or 90% of the launch market globally is not just because they’ve done all these things that are better than pretty much every other launch provider around the globe, it’s also because they have Starlink that is driving up that number. If you remove Starlink from the equation, they would be closer to — I don’t know, maybe 20% or 30% of the launch market, or 40%, but it certainly wouldn’t be 90%. 

And when you talk about making a constellation of satellites — satellites that need to be replaced every few years as well —  to make up an “orbital data center,” quote unquote, you’re just guaranteeing that much more business for your launch business. And I just can’t stop myself from coming back to that point.

Kirsten: I want to really quickly say that [SpaceX’s] other big business is renting out their compute, by the way. So back to the chip conversation. We’ve come full circle.

Anthony: One of the other themes that may run through this episode is this idea of talking your own book. This is not a new phenomenon. Executives at tech companies, or any other company, what they’re predicting for the future is ultimately the future that is going to be advantageous to their business. 

But I think it’s something that’s just always worth remembering when we’re having these conversations about big AI companies, because it is this moment of incredible uncertainty, and we’re all wondering: What does the job market look like in the future? What effect is this going to have on the environment? What are the skills I need to learn? 

All these AI CEOs or AI investors, they all have thoughts on that. And it’s not that they’re wrong or that they are being deliberately misleading, but in each case, there’s an asterisk to these predictions. In Musk’s case, he’s talking about something that would be very good for SpaceX’s business. In SoftBank’s case, they are very, very heavily invested in data center projects here on Earth. Sam Altman is the other notable figure who’s rolled his eyes a bit at the orbital data center idea — and again, he and Elon Musk obviously have a long and complicated history together.

All of which is to say that there’s just no objective, impartial observers here. It’s all these people with baggage and tremendous amounts of money at stake.