What's Next

Everything on the rest of this site is already happening. This page is for what's coming — the stuff that's been announced but isn't built yet.

Starmind

Starmind is SpaceX's plan for an AI satellite megaconstellation — up to a million satellites in orbit, each one functioning as its own AI compute node, running inference directly in space instead of in a data center on the ground. It's the space-based extension of everything xAI is doing with Grok, powered by solar instead of the terrestrial grid.

AI1: the first satellite

The initial satellite design, AI1, is genuinely massive — roughly 20 meters (65 ft) tall with a 70-meter (229 ft) solar wingspan, generating around 210kW of power. It flies in a sun-synchronous orbit specifically chosen so it faces the sun about 98% of the time, keeping those solar arrays fed almost constantly. In August 2026, SpaceX and NVIDIA jointly announced AI1 will run on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 chips.

Why put a data center in space?

Ground-based data centers compete for land, water (for cooling), and grid power — all increasingly scarce as AI compute demand grows. A satellite in the right orbit gets near-constant sunlight and the vacuum of space as a heat sink, sidestepping both problems at once. It's the same instinct behind Terafab — Musk running into a real infrastructure bottleneck and deciding to build his way around it rather than compete for a scarce resource.

Production timeline

Manufacturing is planned at a new "Gigasat Factory" in Bastrop, Texas, with production of thousands of satellites targeted to begin in late 2027. It's still early — this is a roadmap item, not a deployed system — but the hardware design and chip supplier are already locked in.