Elon Musk just told the market what real AI infrastructure looks like: SpaceX will build exclusively on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, with plans for 10 gigawatts of compute online by 2027—no government program, no equity mandate, just the best hardware money can buy.
The decision, announced on SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company, is a straight free-market play. While Washington funnels taxpayer dollars into politically guided AI initiatives, Musk is going straight to the private sector's top shelf. "Going forward, we have decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture," Musk said, according to Benzinga. "We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia."
SpaceX plans to close out this year with over two gigawatts of compute capacity, Musk said, with that figure climbing to "several times higher" by the end of 2027. Cumulative online compute could approach 10 gigawatts—power that would dwarf most government-backed AI clusters.
Wccftech, which led with the technical details, reported that the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack—codenamed Kyber—will anchor SpaceX's terrestrial data centers. But the more striking detail is the orbital ambition. NVIDIA has already unveiled its space-certified Space-1 Vera Rubin module, packing four Rubin GPUs and two Vera CPUs, with up to 25 times the AI compute capability of the previous H100 for orbital workloads. SpaceX previously announced a partnership with Anthropic to build a multi-gigawatt orbital AI data center, and Musk confirmed the NVL72 system will deploy "on the ground, as well as in orbit."
Musk's reasoning is plain engineering judgment: "We think the design of the NVL72 VR computer is a much better design than is typical than, say, having a standard rack-style design."
NVIDIA shares ticked up 1.67% in after-hours trading to $215.47, Benzinga noted. The market read this for what it is—a major validation of NVIDIA's next-generation platform by one of the most demanding customers on Earth.
But the backdrop is less rosy. International Business Times framed the earnings call against a wave of short selling and a steep stock decline, largely burying the NVIDIA commitment. SpaceX debuted at $135 per share in June, surged to a record $225, then fell to $114.53—down 15% from its IPO price and nearly 49% below its peak. The selloff erased more than $1 trillion in market value. Musk's response to short sellers was characteristically blunt: "I try to warn them, but they just double down."
IBT also flagged a looming lockup expiration: on August 6, roughly 911.5 million shares valued at over $100 billion become eligible for sale, with billions more unlocking later this year. Wall Street expects a Q2 loss of 24 cents per share on revenue of approximately $6.8 billion, with consensus loss estimates widening about 18% over the past month.
Drew Cupps, portfolio manager at Polen Capital, told Bloomberg: "There is so much that's in the future of the SpaceX story. There's not a lot of here and now."
That's the tension. Musk is making a decade-scale bet on compute infrastructure—terrestrial and orbital—while the market wants quarterly proof. The question is whether 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA power, some of it circling above the atmosphere, is enough to quiet the skeptics. Or whether the short sellers doubling down know something Musk doesn't.