100 GW/year of orbital solar-powered AI compute is an engineering equation, not a slogan. 1 Mt of payload to orbit annually at 100 kW/ton delivers it. Starship cadence of ~10 k flights/year closes the mass. By aircraft standards that cadence is modest; relative to today’s entire rocket industry it is transformative. This is the concrete path from power-constrained terrestrial data centers to continuous, radiation-hardened orbital compute at civilizational scale. Source I Elon Musk

$CRWV is targeting 8 GW across its whole portfolio by 2030. $NSCL aims to do that from one data center. Nscale filed its S-1 last week at a rumored $30B valuation with $103B in signed contracts. $88B of that is just Anthropic and $MSFT. That's 0.28x EV to backlog. $CRWV trades at 0.92x, $IREN at 1.54x and $NBIS at 1.72x. It's extremely early though as Nscale has just 55 MW live today, a fraction of its peers. The entire story here hinges on Monarch, a monstrous West Virginia data center running on a natural gas microgrid that accounts for 80% of the company's pipeline. @AsymmetricBets_ just did a deep dive into Nscale's S-1, and several things stood out to us. $NVDA is a supplier, customer, shareholder, lease guarantor and warrant holder. Nvidia even guarantees the $860M lease on Nscale's Texas site. Sheryl Sandberg and Fidji Simo joined the board this year. The software side is interesting too. In July it bought Anyscale for $1.65B in an all stock deal. Those are the creators of Ray, the open source framework with 740M+ downloads running AI workloads across thousands of GPUs. Risks are massive too and active capacity compared to peers leaves much to be desired. Execution track record is basically non-existent, as all capacity today is co-located or leased. A plan to power the whole thing using Caterpillar gensets feels like a good short term solution, but backlogs and delays with Cat have been persistent, and engines are typically just bridge power until a grid interconnect is available. The company's huge bet on one single location leaves it exposed to local opposition. Mason County residents organized a protest in March and over 900 people filed comments opposing the project. State inspectors already flagged dust violations at the site in May. Full deep dive out now: