Elon Musk says SpaceX (SPCX) is looking to have as much as 20 gigawatts’ worth of power, cooling, and electrical infrastructure tied to the company’s AI hyperscaler ambitions by the end of next year.
Twenty gigawatts represents an enormous amount of power, nearly half of the 53 gigawatts of new power generation capacity added to the US power grid in 2025
Such large demand is set to be another boon for the industrial companies benefiting from unrelenting demand for the power equipment and other infrastructure needed to support the AI boom, from natural gas turbines to HVAC systems. “SpaceX commentary on power got our attention,” James West, managing director at Melius Research, said in a recent note to clients. “This is a clear positive for equipment suppliers.” Elon Musk has made SpaceX’s hyperscaler ambitions a driving focus of the firm, with more than 90% of the company’s total addressable market — or roughly $26.5 trillion — forecast to come from AI, per SpaceX’s prospectus. In SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, Musk said he expects the company to have 2 gigawatts of compute capacity available, with plans to have as much as 10 gigawatts of compute online by the end of next year. But that doesn’t mean SpaceX will only build out the physical infrastructure required for 10 gigawatts of compute, Musk said.
Instead, “We’re actually aiming to far exceed that gigawatt number in terms of power online, power cooling, and electrical equipment,” he told analysts on Tuesday, citing a “tentative target” of 20 gigawatts’ worth of power and cooling equipment online by the end of next year. Even if his forecasts don’t pan out as expected, Musk said, the company should still have somewhere around 15 gigawatts of capacity “at the power plant level” by the end of 2027. Musk’s comments underscore the enormous energy demands underpinning the next generation of AI build-outs, which have already sent the industrials climbing by 20% since Jan. 1 and by more than 80%…