Elon Musk's Orbital AI Vision and the Public Stocks Left in its Wake
I have always found it darkly amusing that the technology industry spends billions trying to solve problems it created in the first place. Right now, the brightest minds in Silicon Valley are panicking about electricity. Artificial intelligence models require an astonishing amount of power and generate enough heat to boil a small lake. Earth bound data centres are hitting their limits. They need vast tracts of land, gigawatts of grid power, and endless oceans of cooling water.
Have you tried getting planning permission for a hyperscale data centre in Surrey lately. It is not exactly a swift process.
Elon Musk, never one to let terrestrial bureaucracy slow him down, appears to have found a rather extreme loophole. He is reportedly combining two of his most formidable private companies, SpaceX and xAI, into a single entity. The valuation floating around is roughly $1.25 trillion. The goal is not just corporate synergy. It is a fundamental shift in how we might process information. Musk seems to be asking a very simple, profoundly expensive question. Why build data centres on Earth when space is vast, cold, and entirely devoid of local councils.
The logic is surprisingly elegant. In orbit, you have unrestricted access to solar energy. The vacuum of space is effectively a giant freezer. An orbital AI network could, in theory, process data from millions of sensors globally without routing it through an ossified terrestrial cable network.
But there is a catch for the everyday investor.
SpaceX and xAI are strictly private. They sit behind an impenetrable velvet rope, funded by billionaires and sovereign wealth funds. You and I cannot buy shares in them. If you are observing how the AI Space Race (SpaceX-xAI) Creates New Investment Wave, you will quickly realise that direct exposure is impossible. We are forced to look at the secondary players. We have to identify the publicly listed companies that build the scaffolding for this new orbital economy.
This brings us to the proxies. These are the companies that manufacture the rockets, build the satellites, and operate the communication networks. They are entirely separate businesses, but they happen to live in the exact neighbourhood Musk is trying to gentrify.
