Elon Musk is building orbital data centers. Sam Altman just called the idea ridiculous.
One of them is thinking in decades. The other is thinking in quarters.
Altman: “I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous.”
The math he’s running is real. Launch costs are brutal. Power economics favor earth. GPUs break and you can’t send a technician to orbit.
Altman: “If you just do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power we can do on Earth, to say nothing of how you’re going to fix a broken GPU in space, and they do break a lot still unfortunately.”
He’s not wrong about today.
He might be wrong about what today’s constraints tell us about tomorrow.
Altman: “We are not there yet. Orbital data centers are not something it’s going to matter at scale this decade.”
This decade. That’s the qualifier doing all the work.
Musk has never been in the business of optimizing for this decade. He’s in the business of building infrastructure everyone calls ridiculous until it becomes inevitable.
They called reusable rockets ridiculous.
Until Falcon 9 landed itself.
And the entire economics of space changed overnight.
Orbital compute has the same logic underneath it. No land constraints. No permits. No power grid politics. Unlimited solar energy. Positioned anywhere on earth within milliseconds.
The launch costs that make it unviable today are the same launch costs Starship is designed to collapse by orders of magnitude.
Altman is doing the math on the current landscape.
Musk is building a different landscape entirely.
When the person who made rockets reusable tells you space infrastructure is coming, that’s not a vision.
That’s a roadmap.
Elon Musk is building orbital data centers. Sam Altman just called the idea ridiculous.
One of them is thinking in decades. The other is thinking in quarters.
Altman: “I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous.”
The… pic.twitter.com/J4YQw4mHJj
— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) February 21, 2026