“Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived,” announced Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang in a statement this week. It’s a great line, but it’s also part of a very real physical artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for the fabless semiconductor giant.
Starcloud, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program, filed this week with the FCC for permission to launch 88,000 satellites into orbit. According to the filing, “the explosive growth of datacenter demands driven by AI… is already encountering severe roadblocks to efforts to scale on the ground.”
By going extraterrestrial to avoid those roadblocks, Starcloud claims that “space datacenters will be the most cost-effective and scalable way to deliver compute this decade.”
The Data Center Opportunity in Space
The company is already committing significant capital (and hardware) to the goal. CEO Philip Johnston highlighted in an interview with Sequoia just how many of Nvidia’s GPUs he’s already sent into space.
“I mean, we really are talking about by far the largest market opportunity ever,” enthused Johnston of AI data centers in space. “So we are talking about trillions of dollars per year of CapEx spend going.”
Save This Watchlist of AI Space Stocks
The question for investors, says Barchart’s own Senior Market Strategist John Rowland, CMT, is where’s the opportunity now?
“How do they get them into space? Who is going to build them, and what materials – besides the NVDA chips – are needed for the satellites?” John explains.
Rowland’s top 4 picks in the space race right now:
- Rocket Labs (RKLB) – launch systems
- ATI (ATI) – satellite components
- Carpenter Technology (CRS) – rocket alloys & materials
- Woodward (WWD) – rocket fuel
And be sure to check out this full watchlist of space data center stocks curated by John, too. The lineup includes several rocket manufacturers, rocket fuel, and satellite-capable providers – along with the “space majors,” and some ETFs that contain all of the above, too.
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