SpaceX Gigasat Factory

Overview

A Satellite Factory From Ingot to Orbit

The SpaceX Gigasat Factory is an 11-million-square-foot satellite campus on about 1,000 acres owned or under contract by SpaceX and other Musk companies along FM 1209 in Bastrop County, about 30 miles southeast of Austin. It sits in the SpaceX Bastrop Complex beside the Starlink factory and is built to make AI1, SpaceX's first orbital data center satellite, with the solar cells, circuit boards and ground hardware that go into it.

Elon Musk unveiled Gigasat on June 8, 2026, four days before SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq as SPCX. At 11 million square feet it would exceed the 10-million-square-foot main building at Giga Texas. Bloomberg reported in May 2026, from county permit filings, that the site includes a 10 GW a year solar cell plant on two 5 GW floors.

AI1

AI1: One Server Rack in Orbit

AI1 reuses Starlink V3 solar arrays, thermal systems and laser links around a compute payload built from interchangeable modules. SpaceX engineer Ian Dahl called it simpler than a Starlink broadband satellite because it needs no large phased-array antennas for consumer downlink. On August 4, 2026 SpaceX said Nvidia is co-developing the compute payload. The constellation is named Starmind, which SpaceX describes as clusters of about 10 satellites joined by about 10 terabits per second of laser bandwidth.

Scale targets

One Gigawatt a Year by the End of 2027

Starlink had about 11,150 satellites in orbit in early October 2026. One gigawatt a year means launching more AI1 satellites in a year than the whole Starlink constellation, at 30-50 per flight, so the schedule depends on Starship flying at high cadence. Musk has called the design SpaceX's "first best effort" and has made no promise on deployment timing or constellation size.

Silicon and solar

Cells, Chips and Boards Made on Site

Gigasat is built to make most of its own inputs, starting with solar cells.

The solar plant sets the ceiling on the constellation. Each AI1 carries about 150 kW of array, so orbital compute can only grow as fast as Bastrop makes cells. China's manufacturers make most of the world's solar cells and wafers; making them in Bastrop puts both supply and cost under SpaceX control, and no other satellite maker runs from ingot to finished spacecraft at one site.

The first AI1 satellites fly Nvidia silicon. Later versions are planned around radiation-hardened chips from Terafab, the chip program SpaceX, Tesla and SpaceXSI launched in March 2026; Tesla's D3 (Dojo 3) space chip was announced with it. The planned path for that silicon runs through Texas: design at Giga Texas, fabrication at Samsung Taylor or Terafab Gibbons Creek, packaging at the Starlink factory, integration at Gigasat and launch from Starbase.

Central Texas space

Space Manufacturing in Central Texas

The Austin Aerospace and Space Corridor maps these sites together.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• SpaceX Bastrop Complex
• SpaceX Starlink Factory Bastrop
• Blades and Vanes Foundry
• Terafab Gibbons Creek
• SpaceX Starbase
• Texas LLM Compute Footprint