By Renana Ashkenazi
By Renana Ashkenazi
In an opinion piece published by CTech by Calcalist, Renana Ashkenazi examines Elon Musk’s move to merge xAI into SpaceX and target a $1.5 trillion valuation.
Elon Musk is positioning SpaceX not as a space company, but as infrastructure. The merger with xAI places rockets, satellites and AI in a single stack, creating what is described as “the railroad, the network and the factories of the AI economy.”
A trillion-plus valuation reflects how capital markets are pricing future infrastructure, not a space narrative. The constraint shaping AI is no longer models. It is power, cooling, land and local politics. Data centers are already colliding with grid limits and community resistance.
The move is framed as “physics arbitrage.” Data centers on Earth face two constraints: energy demand and heat. Both intensify as models scale.
Orbit changes those conditions. Space offers continuous solar exposure and a natural cooling environment. “Floating data centers” reflect a bet that orbital energy and cooling will outperform terrestrial limits tied to land, permits and power.
SpaceX operates the launch system, Starlink provides global connectivity, and xAI represents compute. This combines transport, network and intelligence into one system.
“If you want to launch serious hardware into space, you pay Musk’s toll.” Starlink already serves as a backbone where terrestrial infrastructure is limited. Integrating xAI places compute at the end of that system, forming a vertically integrated infrastructure stack.
As AI becomes critical across sectors, control over infrastructure becomes a question of sovereignty.
This concentration extends beyond connectivity to compute. The infrastructure enabling AI may become centralized and privately governed, rather than distributed across public systems.
“Musk’s move is extreme by design. But the message is simple: AI has outgrown the fantasy it’s just software in the cloud.”
Read the full article by Renana Ashkenazi here.
