Behind The Scenes
Who Elon's Companies Actually Work With
This isn't one company working alone. Real, publicly documented deals with the biggest names in tech and the U.S. government are quietly holding a lot of this together. Here's what's actually on the record.
Three separate deals, over a decade: Google invested $900 million in SpaceX back in 2015, years before Starlink existed. In 2021, SpaceX started installing Starlink ground stations directly at Google Cloud data centers for a private, low-latency link into Google Cloud's network. And in 2026, Google agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI's data centers — with reported talks about moving AI data centers into orbit next.
Read the full story on the SpaceX page →U.S. Space Force & National Reconnaissance Office
Starshield — the military variant of the Starlink satellite bus — has become one of the Pentagon's most-used low-orbit providers. The NRO has launched 227 Starshield satellites since 2024, and the Space Force awarded SpaceX a $2.29 billion contract in 2026 to build a secure communications backbone connecting sensors, aircraft, and missile defense systems worldwide. Pentagon documents concluded SpaceX is currently the only provider able to meet certain military connectivity requirements — there's no real backup.
Read the full story on the SpaceX page →NVIDIA
SpaceX and NVIDIA jointly announced in August 2026 that AI1 — the first Starmind satellite, SpaceX's planned AI-compute-in-orbit megaconstellation — will run on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 chips. It's NVIDIA's hardware doing the actual thinking on a satellite designed to face the sun 98% of the time.
Read the full story on the What's Next page →Intel
Tesla and SpaceX have reportedly committed to building Terafab — the joint chip fab with xAI planned to be the largest building in the world — on Intel's 14A manufacturing process. A company that doesn't make its own chips today is betting a fab that could scale to $119 billion in investment on Intel's next-generation node.
Read the full story on the Terafab page →