Jensen Huang recently said that a complete 1 GW AI factory costs about $50B. Meanwhile, Elon said on the earning call that he expects SpaceX to reach around 13 GW of compute by the end of 2027, compared with roughly 2.5–3 GW expected by the end of this year. If Jensen’s estimate applies, that additional capacity represents a buildout costing around $500B.

SpaceX reported about $90B in cash and marketable securities at the end of September, and the FT and Reuters reported talks on a further $40B debt package for Nvidia chips. For scale, Q4 capex guidance is $35–40B, up from $19.6B in Q3. A $500B buildout in 2027 implies roughly $125B a quarter, about three times that guidance.

I appreciate that the $500B is only a rough estimate, what I’m struggling to understand is how the business anticipates to raise that money. The CFO says new compute deployments pay back in under a year “at current pricing”, but adding roughly 10 GW in a year means bringing on almost a gigawatt every month.…