Ep. 024 - SpaceX's 10GW Plan Drives $300B ARR by 2027 (Datacenter, Energy) | Reyk Knuhtsen, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Jordan Nanos

**Jordan Nanos** (0:00)
You're adjusting the NVIDIA logo to make sure it's on display.

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (0:04)
Yeah, man, when you have GPUs at home, you got to show them to the world.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:08)
That's actually a GPU?

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (0:10)
It's a decommissioned GPU. You have all the heat sink, all the head sink, but there's no GPU. If you remove all of this, you'll see there's no GPU.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:17)
You're going to start running some local models to stop this token burn that you've been jacking up or what?

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (0:22)
God, cut costs, man. But they keep telling me it's cheaper on the cloud.
I'm like, okay. My electricity bill can't handle it.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:31)
Jeremie, Reyk, we're going to talk about SpaceX doing 10 gigawatts in 27 You guys ready?
Welcome back to SemiAnalysis Weekly. We got Jeremie and Reyk, like I said, we're going to talk about the article we put out that got a lot of traction. SpaceX 10 gigawatt 2027, why it's real will drive $300 billion of ARR for SpaceX and why Microsoft will be the largest off-taker. We're going to try and talk through some of Elon's statements on the earnings call, talk through the economics, how we get that 100 million per megawatt per year that they're going to sell this stuff at when you pass through the tokens. Microsoft is a potential customer, how they pay for it, and how they get enough chips and people. Guys, welcome. Excited to dig in.

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (1:17)
Yeah, let's go.

**Reyk Knuhtsen** (1:19)
Yeah. Thanks for having us, Jordan.

**Jordan Nanos** (1:21)
All right, Jeremie, your first author here. Elon's statements during the earnings call, conservatively, what does this mean? What's the takeaway when he has SpaceX first ever earnings call and says that he's got these gigawatt ambitions?

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (1:35)
Look, I think it all really starts from the economics. That's really the key thing.
What we've observed over the course of 2026 is gross margins for these labs just kept going up. That has been the key driver of their ARR acceleration. If you look at them combined today, that is Anthropic and OpenAI. They're both adding combined over $20 billion of ARR per month, actually close to $30 now. By itself, that drives AI revenue, adding close to $400 billion per year. They're doing that by increasing their gross margins. Increasing their gross margins, essentially that just means for any given amount of compute, which typically is roughly a fixed cost, like we've seen $12, $13, $14 million bucks a megawatt year from the likes of Corweave. Increasing the gross margin just means that revenue per watt goes up.
For us, and that's what I want to flip it to you, is for us we've done a lot of work on trying to understand what is the actual revenue per megawatt. Obviously, we have InferenceX. In this article, what we put out is that we think they can fairly easily today, today on API that is OpenAI and Anthropic make $100 million per megawatt per year. And just tying it back to like, why is Elon trying to build so many gigawatts so fast? Well, it's because no one else is doing it so fast. No one else is really banking on the opportunity of like, okay, for any megawatt that they have, they can make so much money. And so he was sort of the first to realize, hey man, if you want this free month from now, you want 300 megawatts right now, pay me $50 per megawatt. You're going to make 50% gross margin.
And so essentially, he just want to replicate that playbook and do that at much larger scale. And if the economics are that good, everything downstream is much easier, right? So the first question we should ask ourselves is, is $100 million per megawatt per year realistic for OpenAI and Anthropic on API today, right? So what do you think of that, Jordan?

**Jordan Nanos** (3:43)
Yeah, I mean, I think it is real. So it's definitely realistic.
We've dug into this in great detail. Let me share this chart so that we can actually explain the details. But yeah, when we talk through maybe the different ways in which GPUs transact, you can start at the beginning, like you said, $12 or $13 billion per gigawatt, which is $12 or $13 million per megawatt. And then that's like the five-year average infrastructure as a service price across CoreWeave, Oracle, Nebius, long-term, close to self-build pricing for these guys. Like maybe they're making double-digit margins on these things, but it's not massive. And where things change is when you sell for a premium because either you're getting on-demand, which is the green column here, the B300s, or you're doing these deals where SpaceX is selling their existing compute to somebody because they can turn on so much of it immediately. And like you said, that's the reason you can transact at such a significant premium. And specifically, this Google deal at like the equivalent of 14 bucks an hour is a significant premium over the average, which might land around three bucks an hour for a Gb300 right now, right?