SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Says 100GW Of Solar Power In Space Could Match 800GW On Earth For Starmind

• He added that ground-based solar “must be paired with massive batteries to continue powering compute at night and supplemented with combustion or nuclear power during winter.”
• The comment comes on the heels of SpaceX’s newly announced partnership with German equipment maker Singulus Technologies.
• Singulus will develop high-performance solar cells and the associated production equipment under a deal for SpaceX’s Starmind satellites. 

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday pushed back on comparisons between terrestrial and orbital solar power as his company escalates efforts to put up data centers in space.

“100GW in space is roughly equal to 800GW on Earth,” Musk said in a post on X. He added that ground-based solar “must be paired with massive batteries to continue powering compute at night and supplemented with combustion or nuclear power during winter,” concluding that the two approaches “are not the same at all.”

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The comment comes on the heels of SpaceX’s newly announced partnership with German equipment maker Singulus Technologies. Earlier this week, Singulus confirmed a contract worth more than €60 million to supply a turnkey heterojunction (HJT) solar-cell production line to SpaceX, with delivery targeted for the first half of 2027 at a facility in Bastrop, Texas. Musk has described the broader order as covering 100 GW per year of HJT manufacturing equipment.

Singulus will develop high-performance solar cells and the associated production equipment under the deal for SpaceX’s Starmind satellites—its planned constellation of solar-powered satellites designed to run artificial intelligence workloads in orbit. Reliable, high-efficiency solar power is essential for the energy-intensive Starmind architecture, which aims to place large-scale AI compute in orbit.

Unlike Starlink, which primarily relays broadband traffic, Starmind satellites are intended as orbital data centers that process compute tasks in space using energy from the sun, thereby bypassing terrestrial constraints on power, land, cooling, and space required to scale AI infrastructure.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has previously said that data centers in space will eventually outpace terrestrial infrastructure. SpaceX has filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for authority to operate up to one million Starmind satellites. The first launches of the satellites are expected to start in the latter half of next year.

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