SpaceX and Google are in talks to explore a rocket-launch partnership as both companies pursue orbital data centers. Google, which owns 6.1% of SpaceX and has a board seat, announced its own orbital computing initiative last year called Project Suncatcher, targeting prototype satellites by 2027 in partnership with Planet Labs. SpaceX has separately filed an application to launch up to 1 million satellites to support its orbital data center ambitions, while Anthropic has already expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX on orbital compute as part of its Colossus deal.
The appeal of orbital data centers is that solar-powered satellites eliminate the land and power constraints that make terrestrial data centers increasingly difficult to site and build. Whether the engineering works at scale is a different question, and many industry experts remain skeptical. Nevertheless, the Google talks are the latest in a series of pre-IPO deals that have rewritten SpaceX’s business. As we wrote in our newsletter last week, SpaceX is using its IPO momentum to position itself less as a launch provider and more as the dominant infrastructure layer of the AI era. The orbital data center thesis is the most speculative piece of that. The Google partnership, if it closes, would at minimum signal that the world’s most sophisticated cloud infrastructure company thinks the bet is worth making.
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