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SpaceX Gigasat Factory

Orbital Data Center Satellite Manufacturing at Bastrop County

The Gigasat factory is an 11-million-square-foot vertically integrated satellite manufacturing campus on over 1,000 acres of land SpaceX owns or has under contract on FM 1209 in Bastrop County, Texas — within the broader Musk Bastrop Complex approximately 30 miles southeast of Austin. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the facility on June 8, 2026, four days before SpaceX's IPO on Nasdaq (ticker SPCX) on June 13, positioning orbital AI compute as a core growth narrative alongside the Starlink broadband business. SpaceX priced at $135/share, raised $75 billion, and closed its first trading day at $160.95 — a 19% gain implying a $2.1 trillion market cap.

At 11 million square feet, Gigasat exceeds Giga Texas's 10-million-square-foot main building by floor area. The facility is designed to produce the full AI satellite supply chain on a single site: solar ingots and wafers, solar cells, printed circuit boards, silicon-based electronic components, user terminals, gateways, and the AI1 satellites themselves — plus satellite development and test facilities, warehousing, and logistics infrastructure. Bloomberg reported in May 2026 that SpaceX is building a 10 GW solar manufacturing plant at the site — two floors producing 5 GW of solar cells each annually — to ensure supply-chain independence for the constellation's power systems.

AI1: The Orbital Data Center Satellite

AI1 is SpaceX's first-generation orbital data center spacecraft — one AI server rack in orbit, wrapped in solar arrays, radiators, communications systems, propulsion, shielding, and structure built to survive launch and years of vacuum exposure.

Specification	AI1
Compute power	150 kW peak / 120 kW sustained average
Ground equivalent	Roughly one Nvidia GB300 rack (~140 kW)
Wingspan	~70 meters (wider than a Boeing 747-8)
Deployed height	~20 meters
Power density	70 kW per ton
Solar array	150 kW rated at 250 W/m²
Thermal management	Vertically oriented, double-sided radiators
Compute payload position	Center of structure between solar arrays and radiators
Compute silicon (initial)	Off-the-shelf GB300/Rubin-class (until D3 custom chip reaches volume)
Compute silicon (target)	D3 — SpaceX custom radiation-tolerant chip; meaningful production volume targeting end 2027
Starship payload	30–50 AI1 satellites per launch

SpaceX engineer Ian Dahl described the AI1 design as simpler than a Starlink broadband satellite because it does not need the same large phased-array antennas for consumer downlink. The satellite reuses Starlink V3 bus technology — solar arrays, thermal management systems, and laser inter-satellite links — then wraps them around the compute payload. The compute payload uses modular, interchangeable modules. Musk described the approach as SpaceX's "first best effort" and cautioned the company was making no promises about deployment timeline or constellation size.

Production and Scale Targets

Milestone	Target	Implied Satellite Count
Prototype launches	Two AI1 prototypes, early 2027	2
Meaningful Gigasat production volume	End of 2027	—
1 GW/year annualized orbital compute	End of 2027	~6,500 AI1 satellites/year
100 GW/year	2030 (aspirational)	Order-of-magnitude annual scaling
Terawatt-level orbital compute	Long-term vision	—

For context: Starlink has approximately 10,500 active satellites as of June 2026. The 1 GW/year target at end of 2027 implies launching more AI1 satellites in a single year than the entire current Starlink constellation — requiring Starship at high-cadence launch rates (Musk has cited ambitions of multiple flights per hour at scale). SpaceX filed with the FCC in early 2026 for authorization to launch and operate a constellation of up to one million satellites.

Pre-IPO investor presentations indicated a late-2027 target for first orbital compute demonstrations — proof-of-concept flights to confirm the technology works, rather than the start of revenue-generating service, per Reuters. SpaceX's S-1 prospectus stated the company intends to compete where demand for AI computing has strained terrestrial power grids and data center capacity, with orbital compute offering continuous solar power and a path around earthbound energy constraints.

The D3 Custom Chip

AI1 satellites will initially fly with off-the-shelf Nvidia GB300/Rubin-class silicon. The target compute silicon is D3 — SpaceX's custom radiation-tolerant chip — with meaningful production volumes targeting end of 2027. The semiconductor packaging operation at the Bastrop campus began equipment installation in April 2026 and is targeting production by end of 2026, providing the advanced packaging substrate that integrates D3 (and its predecessors in the Tesla AI silicon roadmap) into orbital-grade deployable modules. The D3 chip connects the Gigasat production line to the broader Tesla-SpaceX silicon pipeline: Tesla AI silicon design → Samsung Taylor or Terafab fabrication → Bastrop advanced packaging → Gigasat satellite integration → Starbase launch.

Vertical Integration at the Factory

The Gigasat factory's vertical integration goes deeper than final satellite assembly. The campus is designed to produce the full upstream supply chain internally:

Production Stage	Output
Solar ingots and wafers	Raw material for solar cells (on-site production)
Solar cell manufacturing	10 GW/year capacity (two 5 GW floors); already under construction
Printed circuit boards	Electronic substrates for satellite systems
Silicon-based electronic components	Board-level electronic assemblies
Semiconductor advanced packaging	Radiation-tolerant orbital silicon modules (D3 and predecessors)
User terminals and gateways	Ground-segment hardware (existing Starlink terminal operation)
AI1 satellite final assembly	Complete orbital data center spacecraft
Satellite development and test	Qualification, environmental testing, integration verification

The 10 GW solar cell factory is the capacity anchor — at 250 W/m² per AI1 satellite, the constellation's power budget scales directly with solar cell production volume. Building the solar supply chain in-house rather than sourcing from the commercial photovoltaic market (dominated by Chinese manufacturers) is both a supply-chain independence decision and a cost-structure decision. The vertical integration from ingot to completed satellite at a single site has no precedent in the satellite manufacturing industry.

Outlook

The Gigasat factory is the production substrate for SpaceX's most ambitious non-launch program. The thesis: terrestrial AI compute is power-grid-constrained, and orbital compute bypasses the constraint with continuous solar power, vacuum cooling, and no land acquisition or grid interconnection approvals. The scale targets — 1 GW by end 2027, 100 GW by 2030, terawatt-level long-term — are aspirational at magnitudes that have no precedent in either the satellite or the data center industry.

Near-term questions resolving in 2027: whether the two prototype AI1 satellites launch and demonstrate the thermal, power, and compute architecture in orbit, whether D3 custom silicon reaches production volume on the stated timeline, whether Gigasat factory production ramps to meaningful satellite output, and whether Starship achieves the launch cadence required to deploy thousands of AI1 satellites per year. Independent engineering critiques have raised questions about whether the thermal and mass figures hold up against known physics — questions that flight telemetry from the 2027 prototypes will begin to answer.

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