SpaceX Orders Solar Equipment With 100-Gigawatt Annual Capacity

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company ordered solar-cell production equipment with annual capacity of 100 gigawatts, adding a manufacturing step for its planned Starmind AI satellite program.

German supplier SINGULUS is providing the heterojunction (HJT) equipment. The 100 GW figure describes the machinery’s annual production capacity. SpaceX had previously ordered a first SINGULUS production line for satellite manufacturing.

Musk has said that 100 GW of solar power in space could have an effect comparable to 800 GW on Earth. He has pointed to the substantial battery storage needed for ground-based solar and said winter generation may also require fossil fuels or nuclear power. Musk has described SpaceX’s long-term goal as deploying one terawatt of energy in space each year.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said building space data center infrastructure at sufficient scale would be difficult unless SpaceX approached a launch rate of once per day. He cited GPU racks weighing up to one ton, the lack of air for convective cooling and long-term exposure to space radiation.

Garman said those challenges may be solvable, but cost-effective deployment at scale could remain difficult for 10 to 20 years. He also said AWS adds one GPU every 14 seconds while demand continues to exceed supply.