Elon Musk is about to launch an Nvidia data center into orbit — and he's betting everything on its chips

SpaceX plans to launch a data center into orbit in 2027, according to the company's new timeline. The satellite, called Vera Rubin NVL72, will be a server cabinet about the size of a refrigerator and will be powered by Nvidia chips. The company has decided to exclusively use Nvidia chips for this project, dropping plans to include Google's TPUs.

The satellite will draw about 250 kilowatts of power at peak, and SpaceX has requested permission to launch up to a million of them. The company is also planning to build a chip plant called Terafab to produce chips for the space data centers. Although the project is still in its early stages, SpaceX believes it will be able to provide significantly cheaper compute power in orbit compared to on Earth.