SpaceX unveils $100B Louisiana spaceport, targets 175 kW NVIDIA AI system for orbit in 2027

Over the past several months, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been increasingly vocal about putting AI data centers in space. In February, he predicted that, within five years, “we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth” He said then that SpaceX, then still a private company, was preparing for 10,000 to 30,000 launches annually.

Now, SpaceX has made the biggest stride towards realizing that vision with a $100 billion Louisiana spaceport designed to support thousands of launches per year. Meanwhile, Musk set a fourth-quarter 2027 target for the first Starmind AI1 satellite, which will carry an optimized NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 system rated for 175 kW of average compute and up to 250 kW at peak. The Vera Rubin architecture was unveiled at CES on January 5, 2026.

“SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028,” Musk wrote on X. “Our design is significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack,” Musk added.

Musk recently told The Economist that power and cooling have become tighter constraints on AI growth than chip availability outside China. SpaceX argues that near-continuous solar exposure, reduced battery requirements and freedom from terrestrial grid interconnection bottlenecks could eventually make orbit the cheapest place to run AI.

According to Louisiana Economic Development, construction is expected to begin in 2027, with the first launch targeted for as early as 2029. That would place the Louisiana spaceport’s debut after the first Starmind AI1 mission and Musk’s planned move to “significant scale” in 2028. Early Starmind missions would thus rely on SpaceX’s existing launch infrastructure, with Louisiana providing longer-term capacity.

The program also offers SpaceX a path from launch provider to vertically integrated computing company. The company has also signaled its intent to launch a standalone direct-to-consumer Starlink Mobile service to compete against traditional wireless carriers. Similarly in its potential orbital data center business, SpaceX stands to capture revenue from both transportation and inference.