At a shareholder meeting, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son argued that building data centers in space won't meaningfully cut costs and will take too long, noting that "in the battle for AI, the next few years will be far more important than what might happen a decade or so from now." His skepticism echoes earlier questions raised on TechCrunch's coverage of orbital data center proposals.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and Anthony Ha discussed Son's remarks alongside OpenAI's plans for custom chips and Groq's new $650 million funding round. Kirsten Korosec called it "very ironic" that Son is playing the skeptic, given SoftBank's "long history of wild bets," while Sean O'Kane said that when Musk talks about building a constellation of satellites replaced every few years to form an "orbital data center," he is "guaranteeing that much more business" for SpaceX.
The conversation also touched on the broader compute-constrained landscape driving a wave of so-called neo-cloud providers, including Groq and even Allbirds, which emerged from bankruptcy as a new compute provider. SpaceX, O'Kane noted, has continued down the road of renting out compute, recently signing its first post-IPO deal with a smaller player, even as it pitches a longer-term AI platform with an addressable market the size of U.S. GDP.