Anpanman - The Million Satellite Race: SpaceX, AI, and the Orbital Data Center Revolution

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hey everyone, thanks for joining on a very cold day in the US here. I'm in New York City and it's absolutely freezing. But yeah, I wanted to have a space and talk about this explosion of information that's come out and excitement. Obviously yesterday SpaceX filed with the FCC for a potential constellation of 1 million satellites. Wow. Satellites to do data center applications. These are, this is something that I guess starting back in the 4th quarter of last year started to really pick up steam and interest around it has continued to grow. But now we're seeing formality, a formality, which is SpaceX now applying for constellation. 1 million is a very big number. Oftentimes, I think for those who are not familiar with space, you go out to regulators and ask for more than you think you need. Obviously, you don't want to be ridiculous, but you go for a big number and it looks like Musk went for a massive number. I think for those that follow the industry closely, the Chinese recently disclosed internationally that they are looking to build constellations in the, I think it was like several hundred thousand satellites to compete with Starlink and AST SpaceMobile. And so I guess Musk decided to even go bigger. And then of course, when he tweeted, someone tweeted Dr. Evil saying 1 million, why not 1 billion or 1 million? And then he tweeted, well, actually I meant 1 billion as a joke. But, but yeah, The filing yesterday, I think, is a watershed moment because now you've got the most visible company and arguably the most successful, at least over the last several decades and probably for the foreseeable future, will continue to be the most successful space company filing and making it formal that they are planning to get into the, what we're calling AI data centers in space market. And so as I was walking this morning to get a haircut in freezing weather, I was thinking about what the tweets that came out from Musk meant. And obviously it's caused a huge stir. And of course there's like all this other noise out there and maybe it's part of, I guess, a a distraction, but in actuality, I do think this move to file with the FCC for this new constellation is a big watershed event for space industry. And so, you know, we basically are, we have front row seats to seeing a multi-billion dollar market being born. It's not as if SpaceX was first to do this. Obviously there's players like StarCloud and other startups that have been contemplating this, and this is a concept that's been out there for quite some time. But as we know, when Musk splashes into an industry, it creates waves and draws interest and in some respects validates it, right? And so I saw that firsthand with AST SpaceMobile back in 2017 when Abel came out with his vision for connecting unmodified mobile phones or any 3GPP device to a satellite in space, that was viewed as a pipe dream and kind of crazy. And over the years, he iterated and sent up BlueWalker 1, and then of course BlueWalker 3. And on the cusp of that launch of BlueWalker 3, which is the true prototype of what is now Block 1 and now Block 2 satellites. On the eve of that, that's when Elon Musk came out and said, hey, we're doing direct-to-cell and this is going to be a massive market. And I mean, he kind of, I guess, made proclamations that they had created the technology when in fact they were, they had not. And what SpaceX was putting up, you know, Starlink was was an imperfect solution, minimally viable product. But nonetheless, it drew interest into the sector, right? And so when people saw that, they're like, wow, this must be pretty big. And it immediately shut down the naysayers. I mean, the naysayers today even say that that market's going to be small or it's not going to be economically attractive. But yet, I mean, just, you know, like the writing's on the wall, like, SpaceX bought, you know, EchoStar spectrum to be used for direct-to-cell just for US, and they spent over $20 billion on that spectrum. And so for any naysayers saying that the market's going to be small, you don't do that, right? And of course, AST SpaceMobile purchased Legato spectrum. And so I think the point I'm trying to make is that SpaceX and Musk in general, they help validate markets, right? And so the, for example, StarCloud, the CEO has been pretty active in talking about data centers in space and he's, he probably had folks kind of laughing at him. But now, because SpaceX has pretty much, you know, their, the whole point of their IPO is to make this thing happen, right? And we know that Starlink is the biggest driver of value at SpaceX. However, this IPO to go public and, you know, have all that scrutiny and the pressure of performing as a public company. The whole point is to raise money to go after this big opportunity. And so for StarCloud, when you look at, and by the way, like I know a little bit about the company and I've looked at the architecture, which I think is pretty insane if you look at what they're proposing in terms of their, Their satellite array or their solar array and the architecture, it looks like a big target that would get hit by debris. But I won't go into details there. But for StarCloud, this is great for SpaceX to get into this business because then now StarCloud, if they were having a hard time raising money, now they can. And there's going to be a lot of interest because I think the thing that people fail to recognize is that SpaceX is, you know, their merger potentially with xAI, with Tesla, that's becoming a vertically integrated player of all kinds of stuff, right? And so Tesla is more than just cars, it's robots, it's, you know, they're going to start building out more solar capacity. And then of course you've got launch, you've got communication satellites, then end service, you're going to have data centers, and then you have applications and AI, like of course X, and then you've got xAI. And so the idea that, and we saw this with the solar names on Friday when Tesla said, hey, we're going to build 100 gigawatts of production capacities for solar panels, modules and cells. A bunch of solar names sold off because some sell-side research analysts were like, well, what if Tesla decides to sell some of that externally to the market? And I guess they didn't read the transcript closely that Tesla/Musk, his entire empire, they're planning to utilize every single Gigawatt of production into their own data centers and their own applications, and so it's just for internal consumption. And what people forget is that solar is going to be a driver of generating electricity, and so they are not even close to having enough capacity to meet that demand. And China is like. I think they're head and shoulders above US in terms of installed capacity and production and companies like T1 Energy. There's a big opportunity for them. They're going to be at 5 modules and solar cells, but then beyond that, people will eventually start pricing in the fact that these guys are going to have to build out even more capacity. Because the fact that you're building enough capacity to generate 5 nuclear plants worth of power, that's not enough. And this idea that the grid infrastructure is not strong enough and you're going to have to put solar production, or sorry, power production right next to data centers. I think that's going to be an increasing way of Where these, you know, whether it's natural gas or solar or nuclear, like you're gonna have to put those right next to the data centers because there's no way to connect all this stuff. But anyway, but yeah, going back to what this news means, I mean, as I said before, Musk, he has this ability. Yeah, he might miss deadlines and things like that, but he's a visionary. He's actually very good at seeing where the puck is going. And if you think about SpaceX, what they've done, they created reusable rockets, which people poo-pooed. They thought it wasn't possible, but it happened. And then based off of that, when he was doing work for OneWeb, he's like, oh, I should get into this fixed wireless business, but do it better. I'm going to do it in LEO. And I'm going to offer low latency and high speeds. And so, you know, he saw a customer doing it and then he did it, he replicated it, right? And so, and that holds true with AST SpaceMobile is like, oh, what these guys are doing is interesting. I'm going to try to do something similar. And in that case, you know, I'd argue that they fell short in terms of technology, but they'll eventually get there and they'll be a good competitor in what should be a duopoly. But, and this goes back to even electric vehicles, right? Like Musk acquired Tesla and took it to the next level when people were poo-pooing electric vehicles, right? Like, oh, this isn't viable. They have all these drawbacks. And, but he made that a reality. And so I think It's important for people to take a step back because if, and just think about the bigger picture, right? Because the thing about AI data centers is, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a ton of things to work out. And is it going to be, you know, is it something that you can count on this year? No. Is it going to be next year? Is it going to be the year after? No. I mean, there's going to be test satellites going up and people are going to be figuring things out. And even small companies like I, In one of the, in my tweet today, I talked about the Powerbank, which is ticker SUN. They are providing the solar thermal and power management system for this one test satellite, which is planning to do distributed compute up in space. This company Orbit AI. But there's going to be a lot of players, right? And, but I think the most important thing is that The fact that SpaceX is serious about this and they're putting dollars towards it, it's going to happen. And is it going to happen in 2 years or is it going to happen in 5 years? I mean, I can't tell you that. And most likely if SpaceX is saying it's going to happen in 3 years, it's probably going to happen in 5 to 6 years, right? It's going to take twice the time, but this market's going to be huge. And the reason why it's important for space is that Space previously was somewhat of a small market, or not small, but there were only a handful of areas where you could really make money, right? And so what I mean by that is Earth observation, that's what like Planet Labs and BlackSky and I guess the smaller players, SatLogic and others, that market was interesting and people talked about like, oh, there's a lot of cool applications. Like, doing city planning or obviously, you know, checking out changing environments, a whole host of different applications. But that market today, I think, is about $5 billion in size, right? And so going to 2033, you know, that could, at least I'm, by the way, this is like ChatGPT stuff. So, but by 2033, that market's expected to get to $8 billion in size. And so that's it's big, but it's not that big. Whereas like AST SpaceMobile plays in the communications market for satellites. And so there you're looking at a market that's about $108 billion in 2024. And, you know, that's going to grow pretty significantly over the next several years, I think. Let me see. Did ChatGPT give me anything here? But just to give you, I mean, that the size, in 2024 is pretty massive, and then that's gonna grow. And I think the other day I was looking at direct-to-device. I mean, that market is somewhat nascent, but it's expected to have a CAGR over the next 5 to 10 years of 100%, which is pretty crazy. But in satellites, I guess my point is like in space applications, communications is one of the biggest. It's $108 billion in 2024. GPS or position navigation timing. That's another massive market. It's actually the biggest. It's at $260 billion in 2023. And then you've got government spending, which is $132 billion, which is obviously pretty big. And that's for like military and all these other applications. But aside from those markets, there's not much else. And so the fact that data centers are going to become a reality, it opens up a huge market in terms of TAM for space applications. And so I think, you know, just looking at some potential forecasts for it, I mean, it's not going to get as big as the communications market, but whether you're looking at various sources, it could reach $40 billion by 2035 or perhaps $26 billion, but it's going to be very sizable, right? And it's an area of growth that SpaceX is looking to tap into in order to project growth for potential investors, but also to power the things that they want to do around AI. And I won't go into too much detail as to why doing this stuff in space makes sense. I mean, the biggest element is cooling. I remember I did speak with the Powerbank CEO at one point, and I'm not sure if I remember the number correctly, but I think like 40% of electricity for a data center is actually used to cool the data center. And then like 60% is actually for compute and transmitting data and all that stuff. And so if you can take out that 40% and do it more efficiently, which is in space, of course you've got to pay for that. You got to send how many ever dollars per kilo up to space. But then once it's there on an ongoing basis, you can dedicate much more of the power to actually doing compute functions and communications. Because if you're able to solve heat dissipation, you know, by radiating that into space, whether you use whatever, you know, various technologies, you can do that more efficiently. You also, as I've mentioned other spaces before, if you're doing that here on Earth, you have to make trade-offs because resources are— and whether that's, hey, I'm going to allocate land to build this massive Use the land to grow food. Well, I'm going to use nearby water, freshwater, because you don't want to use saltwater. I'm going to use this water to cool the data center, or I'm going to use it to grow crops and give water to people. And so at some point, it's not as if you can keep building data centers here on Earth into perpetuity. Like you actually, there has to be a cap on it, right? And then I remember there's like some people saying, well, you can put data centers in really cold places or you can put them underwater. Right. And well, if you put the data centers in the cold places, those cold places might not be as cold anymore. We might start melting parts of the Arctic, or if you put them underwater, let's eventually just boil the oceans like that. There's limits to what you can do. And those limits have practical trade-offs between the wellbeing of humans or feeding the AI beast.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: And so that's why Putting some of this stuff, whether it's on the moon or it's in solar or sun-synchronous orbit over the Earth, those are the trade-offs you have to make. And so one of the things that I thought was interesting is that in the FCC application, when they talk about decommissioning these things, so eventually when the satellites run out their useful life, I think the proposal is to actually have some level of propulsion on these satellites where they would just have a, and I might be reading this wrong, but they would, I guess, push themselves out of orbit or, and then head towards the sun to burn up, which is an interesting, I guess, solution. Because one of the biggest issues that I have with SpaceX, and there are tens of thousands of satellites that they're planning for Communications, and then of course potentially a million satellites for data centers is like, how do you get rid of this stuff? Either hopefully you can reuse some of it, which you'll need orbit, something in orbit that can service this stuff, maybe make it go longer, but then maybe repurpose this stuff. It's not easy. The other thing to do is just chuck it out in space, which is what they're saying, which I think in all honesty is a better solution than deorbiting it. Because if you deorbit this stuff, then obviously all these different metals and material burn up into the atmosphere, and then that's not good for humans because you don't want to put these metals into the atmosphere. I mean, we can handle a decent amount, but we can't handle thousands and thousands of satellites deorbiting every day, which by the way, We're talking about Starlink, the eventuality of having tens of thousands of satellites in their constellation that have, that are, and this is a plug for ASD Space Mobile, but having tens of thousands of satellites in very low Earth orbit, which has a very rapid decay where you're expecting useful life for these satellites to be 2 to 3 years maybe. That we are going to hit a point at some point in the next few years where you're going to have hundreds and thousands, thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere. That's not good. And so I'm of the— I'm a fan of having a few hundred satellites in much higher orbit that have useful lives of, call it 7, 10, perhaps even on the upper end, 12 years. I think that's a better, environmentally and performance-wise, I think that's a better approach. But going back to data centers, I think, yeah, this is going to be a huge market and SpaceX is going to be a leader. There's obviously a lot of problems to solve and you've probably seen people tweeting about picking picking at little things here and there and big things of how do you heat these things proper or how do you dissipate heat? How much processing can you put up there? There's all kinds of questions, right? But when you have really smart engineers attacking the problem, I believe you'll eventually get there. And to be quite candid, it's not that different from what we're already doing today. And I've harped on this point where AST SpaceMobile Bluebird satellites, the Block 2 satellites are, they've already got a tremendous amount of power generating capacity. And so I always talk about this when I had a conversation with one of the portfolio managers at Hennessy, who's one of the few institutional investors who's been a longtime holder of AST SpaceMobile. Well, we talked about the future markets for the company and And this is where, this is where like, this is why a company like Tesla or Palantir or AST SpaceMobile for that matter, this is why they trade at high valuations, right? Because you, the market can see, the general market can see like, oh, here's the core business. And for AST, it's like, oh, they're doing direct-to-device connectivity, but then they don't really know, and they haven't dug into the military applications, right? Where we're expecting probably a few hundred million dollars in revenue in this coming year once the constellation's deployed just from military. But then you go beyond that, and this is where people start adding incremental value because of the optionality and expectations for what you've done. Right? And so the Block 2 satellites, you have 100 to 120 kilowatts of power generating capacity. You've got these microns, this flat structure, these, they're modular building blocks that have solar panels on one side, the phased array antennas on the other, and then sandwiched in between, you've got a number of today FPGA processors, which then are going to become ASICs when the company starts incorporating Their proprietary ASIC, and then you know connections between the processors. And then within that array, there's also the ability or the the the micron actually releases heat, and it's it it's a it's a it dissipates heat. And so it's already there; it's all built in, and you've got this like massive. You know, what I would call the Block 2 is already a data center in space. I mean, it's serving a specific function, which is communications, but it's not AI compute. However, the company has talked about the fact that the ASICs are running an AI algorithm to do efficient beamforming. And so it doesn't take much to make the next leap, which is, oh, you know what, let's take out the ASICs and let's put in some like very efficient TPUs, which are ASICs, or GPUs, may not be able to put as many, but let's put some in there and let's see what happens, right? And so we, there's already the ability to do some of this stuff. Now it's not efficient, it's not optimized for data center application, but you can see that, that, you know, Doing some additional engineering, you could eventually get there, right? And so that's what the opportunity is for AST SpaceMobile. Like you have this several-ton satellite that's already doing a high level of compute, but primarily focused on communications applications. But then you just, you make some changes and modifications to that and lo and behold, you have a data center. And so that is the opportunity and it's something that the market doesn't see, but it will see it because now the, you know, we talk about space companies garnering more interest with the SpaceX IPO. Well, guess what? Like, yeah, people are going to learn about direct-to-device, but they're also going to learn about AI data centers in space because that's why the company SpaceX is going public. And so people are going to clamor for, okay, well, what are the ways to play this? Like aside from just owning SpaceX. And so there was other players out there. I mean, like Planet Labs is doing a pilot with Google to send an Nvidia processor, I think sometime at the end of this year or early next year. And that will be in a CubeSat form. And so that's one interesting way to play it. I think, but if you think about the requirements for a data center and how big these things will be, or I think they'll be, I think AST has all the building blocks in place already. And by the way, AST's already partnered with Google on doing communications, optimizing the satellite for Android devices. And so you could easily see the fact that The companies already know each other and this is becoming a bigger opportunity. And quite candidly, for any player like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, any of them, like they're all going to have to find partnerships in order to make this reality because it's not something that these companies have a choice in. It's going to happen and SpaceX is going to lead the way. And in order not to be left behind, this is an arms race, it's a space race. And so they're going to have to find good partners to develop data centers out in space. And there's not many companies that are putting together 5 to 6-ton satellites that can do this, right? Like Planet, I mentioned them before, like they make small CubeSats for Earth observation, but they have not solved And they've not gone through iterations of putting together a big honking satellite that has a solar array that can unfold in a very novel way to generate 100 to 120 kilowatts of power, which by the way, like I find it interesting that Elon, I guess it was like a month ago, mentioned specifically like for a data center in space to work, you need 100 kilowatts of power. And so, hey, guess what? We've got that. And we've got it in a way that fits into a standard rocket fairing that can unfold. And we've already got several of them out in space now, right? And so we've solved probably one of the hardest problems that, you know, generating the power and then 2, managing that from a thermal perspective, like dissipating. And so there aren't other companies out there that I know of. I think actually there's one company called, I think it's K2 Space that's making Their claim to fame is they're making big satellites for big applications. But I don't think they've put a satellite up in space yet. But anyway, there's going to be a bunch of new players that emerge and it's going to be exciting and it's not going to be a winner-take-all market because I don't see some of these other companies working with SpaceX for this stuff because it's too important. Right. And so And I think, you know, obviously Elon's a visionary and he's good at what he does. And, but that said, I think for some of these companies, they probably don't, from a competitive standpoint, they don't trust him. And so they'll want to build their own solutions. And so when you look at the landscape of who else those companies can work with, then there's one obvious choice, which is AST SpaceMobile. There's other companies too that will build parts of this. or could build the entire thing too. I mean, maybe Rocket Lab moves into it. I would, I'd be shocked if they didn't. And, you know, there's other companies as well that are out there. But the important point is that this is a real market. It's early, but it's going to be huge. And it's going to add to this. It's going to be another vertical aside from communications and defense. that's going to be, and GPS, that's going to be very big. Because again, some of these other applications, they're interesting, but they're small. And so I think, you know, for some of the companies that I'm involved in, obviously AST SpaceMobile is probably the best way to play unless you have exposure to SpaceX, whether directly or indirectly. And by the way, like I tweeted this out earlier, I mean, Scott Wiesniewski and the company, they know about this stuff, they're following it, and they probably have been approached by some of the big players in tech about this idea. And for those that don't know, the company is now at a cadence of producing 6 satellites a month, and they've made plans to expand that to eventually 12 satellites a month. And so once a constellation the low-band Block 2 satellites are up and then the mid-band Block 3 satellites are up, or maybe during that process as well. Once those are up, you're going to have this tremendous amount of capacity to build satellites. And so the company, a smart use of that capacity would be to then start building data centers, right? Because you already have the tooling, You've got the people, you've got the know-how, you've got 3,800 patents and patent pending claims. You've got the supply chain, you've got everything. So the most logical economic use of that capacity is to build data centers. And as I mentioned before, like there's not even primes, like the large US primes, like they can't build this stuff, right? Because they're, Those guys are slow-moving, bureaucratic, cost-plus. They don't iterate quickly. I think like Viasat, I forgot which prime they used, but satellites that were being built by prime were like several years too late and way over budget, right? And so it's this next generation of companies that are going to make this vision a reality. And so that's really exciting. And I think that's where, for example, some of these short sellers, they just don't get it. They're like, okay, this company's doing one particular thing. And they don't realize, no, there's a multitude of things. Like once you master this particular area in space and you've got IP, you've got production capacity and supply chain and everything, you can then take on the next problem. Like it's not that big of a stretch. If anything, it just leverages everything you have in place, like you have the building blocks. And so that's where things for AST SpaceMobile are really exciting, right? And so I did mention some other tickers in this, for example, T1 Energy, which is making silicon-based Topcon solar panels. They make modules and cells. This whole idea of solar powering, whether it's terrestrially, so trying to meet terrestrial demand, which is massive in and of itself, but then all of a sudden you're going to need gigawatts of power out in space. That's got to come from somewhere, right? And so, and it's not specialized solar either. It's actually, so taking, going back to this AST SpaceMobile case, AST actually takes commercial-grade solar panels and then they harden them for space and then they put them out in space. And so it's not, they're not going after, they're not using, I forget what the technology is that's very expensive, but it's not silicon topcon. It's actually, but the efficiency of silicon topcon is such that it's gotten to a point where it's good enough for space. And as long as you can harden it for, you know, radiation, temperature changes, all those things, it works. And that's what AST is doing. And so that's why when I tweet about T1 Energy, it's not like T1 is planning to sell, well, maybe they will, but they're not selling their current technology to vendors who are incorporating that into satellites. But eventually that will happen because you're going to need Like if Elon, he's saying, I think it was like 100 gigawatts of power that they're going to need on space. You're going to need to draw on all sources of solar production down here, right? And so whether that's the high-end stuff or the lower-end stuff, it's going to draw demand. And even for players that are not involved in space, they're, the pricing's going to go up. It's just like Here's a great analogy, right? Like, think about Micron and DRAM. Now, Micron, you know, and this goes as well for hard drives and NAND flash, you know, it was a very commodity product and, you know, you could easily get 64 gigs of RAM for your PC and it was pretty cheap. Nowadays, like, you can't because all of it's being consumed by data centers. And so, Even Micron was like, hey, you know what? We're not making memory for PCs anymore. We're actually just focusing entirely on data centers. And so that's the, when I make the point about solar production and demand, that's exactly what I'm pointing to, which is the fact that when you have an application, and in this case it's AI data centers here on Earth, but also eventually in space, it's going to suck up so much demand that I don't know if there will be enough solar panels left for people to put on their homes, right? Because all that stuff is going to go to data centers and out in space. So that's why I think companies like T1 Energy are well positioned because they're building US capacity to make this stuff, right? And so once they get their solar, they already have a solar module plant that's running, that's building you know, 5 gigawatts of capacity every year. They're standing up a solar fab, which will be the end of this year for 5 gigawatts, which will feed cells into the module factory. And the reason why that's important is that the US is very focused on domestic content. And so by doing both vertically, it will be, you know, they're able to get, you know, tax subsidies, which are credits that are incentivizing more US production of this stuff. But then once those 2 things are up, it's not like the company's going to stop there. They're going to build more plants just like what Tesla's doing. I mean, Tesla announced that they're building, what was it? I think it's, they want to get to 100 gigawatts and all that's going to be consumed internally. And so that's where the puck is going. Like solar is the way to go. Like, yeah, nuclear is interesting, but you're probably looking at 10, 20 years out for it to actually make a real impact. Like solar is here now. And so that's why in particular I'm very excited about T1 Energy. I also talked about ASTI, which is a microcap company, and there's other people who've followed it much more closely than I have. And I like have a small spec position in it and it makes some interesting thin film solar modules and they, I think they're flexible and you can put them into space applications. The company has spent a lot of money on R&D. I'm not sure, from a commercial perspective, they've never gotten there. They have interesting technology, but they just haven't been able to commercialize it yet. Although they recently raised money and they've said like, hey, we have these customers who are interested in utilizing the technology. But it's one of these companies that has been a serial funding vehicle where they've continued to raise money and money, money, and they just haven't got there. But at the same time, like, I think now it's, we're at one of those points where maybe this company can work, right? Because there's so much demand and they've got interesting tech. Maybe the company gets bought out or maybe they are able to ramp commercially and it starts becoming interesting. But anyway, I mentioned that because there's a few people I respect that are involved. And so like, I have a small position in it and The other one I want to talk about is PowerBank, which is interestingly, and I talked to the CEO briefly, I guess it was like a few weeks ago just to learn more about the company, but they make, they're focused on like smaller solar projects, but pretty large in size. I mean, this is primarily like residential and small businesses, but if you can imagine, like they're not doing, they're not pulling, putting up a solar panel on your home. They're actually making a solar farm that powers a community. And so when I spoke to the CEO, this guy, Dr. Richard Lu, he has bigger ambitions. Like he wants to pivot the company or move the company up the chain to be more focused on what eventually he views as future, which is data centers having behind-the-meter power, which in in his mind is solar and battery. And so what that means is like, and he's a big proponent of this, you know, the grid today is very old and decrepit. And so even if you build nuclear, solar, all these different energy sources, you can't build them away from where it's needed because the grid just can't handle any more power, right? It can't transmit it. And so What happens in the future, what will happen when people talk about behind the meter, what they mean is that you actually, if you build a data center tomorrow, you actually will then build a big solar farm on top of it. You'll put solar panels, you obviously put some batteries there as well, but all that stuff's going to be behind the meter, meaning you're not drawing energy from ConEd or one of these other— utilities, you're actually generating as much power as you can behind the meter. And that's the only way to really, especially for these data centers that are running AI applications, that's the only way to power them. And so there's companies that are doing, putting gas turbines. And so even like companies that build jet engines are getting into this business where it's like, okay, we're going to take some type of fuel, whether it's gas or kerosene or whatever, and we're going to put these right next to the data centers and we're going to generate the power. And again, it's like repurposed jet engines or in this case, solar. But what this CEO wants to do is he wants to use his expertise to then go, and he's not pursuing like Google or Microsoft or some of these big data centers, Amazon. He's looking at more small, medium enterprises, right? And doing those types of projects. So that's like, that's part of the interesting aspect of the company. And then of course they, and I need to dig in more because I don't know what level of IP they have or they bring to the table. But, you know, they have this pilot project with this company called Orbital AI, which is, you know, they're primarily focused on, I think, blockchain, doing blockchain processing and validation out in space. And there's a whole host of reasons why that makes some sense. But then of course you can, anything that's blockchain related, that's data center, and you can extrapolate that to AI, right? But what this company Powerbank is doing is they provided the solar panel, the solar technology, the electrical management, thermal management, all that stuff for this test satellite, which put up, I believe, I believe an NVIDIA processor as a proof of concept. And so they did that, I guess it was maybe a few weeks ago. And so Powerbank, you know, they changed the name of their company to Powerbank because they're trying to pivot to be something a bit broader than just doing solar projects here terrestrially, but they have ambitions of data centers down here and then of course doing these applications out in space. And so yeah, it's an interesting company. It's, let me just look to verify this. It's a smaller market cap company. I mean, it's not too small. It's like, I think it's around, it says $45 million in Bloomberg, but I think that's higher 'cause they do have some securities that are dilutive as well. But maybe it's more like $70 or $80 million in size. But you know, this is a real company, like they did, They have a June fiscal year, so in 2025 they did $41 million of revenue and gross margins, you know, kind of low, 25%. But they were almost basically breakeven in terms of EBITDA. And then for '26, you know, they're going up to $63 million, '27, $87 million, and, you know, so growing pretty well. And they expect gross margins to get to, and this is the Street, by the way, so gross margins to get to kind kind of the mid-50s by '28 or so, and EBITDA profitability probably by, let's see, June 2027. So what's interesting is that, you know, the company actually does have research coverage. There's like 4 or 5 banks that cover it. It's a small company. You know, when I spoke with the CEO, he was like, you know, we actually spent quite a bit of money. I think it's like $8 or $10 million to stay listed on NASDAQ. And so this guy, from what I can tell, like he's not raising money down here. Like he, I think when they listed on NASDAQ, the stock was like, it hit $5 or $6. And so I think his ambitions are for the company to kind of get back to that level. And from what I understand, like they don't need to raise money. They do have people going to them asking them to raise money, but he refuses. So I think it's kind of an interesting name that I started dabbling in a little bit, but it just kind of plays on the theme of solar being an important contributor to AI data center needs. And then in this instance, like here's a real company that's seasoned, that has built solar projects, that's looking to go into small, medium enterprise type of data center applications, and then they're expanding into space. With like one of the few pilot programs where there's one satellite out there already doing on-space compute. So anyway, but yeah, I think, I guess to wrap this up, I don't want to go too far, too long, but I think I was looking at Elon's Twitter profile right now and he's just tweeting a tweetstorm of how AI data centers are going to be, you know, in space are going to be the next big thing. And yeah, I think it's important, you know, to have some level of skepticism, but also the guy is pretty good at seeing where the puck is going. And I would never really fade his ability to have the clarity to see where the big dollars are going. And obviously, like, you know, he is talking his book to a degree and And a key issue for SpaceX is finding enough cargo to take up to space to fill Starship. And so this is a logical way to do that, right? And so I think the skeptics back in the early 2000s, or was it maybe 2010, '12, '13, '14, when SpaceX was putting up Starlink, a lot of skeptics were like, eh, you know, he's just doing that because he's gotta raise more money and no one's, there's no, not enough cargo, which is true. There wasn't enough cargo to make SpaceX economically viable. And so he had to pursue a big market, which is communications. And so fast forward to today, what was it? I think on the tweet, the tweets that we've seen recently on disclosures for SpaceX, they're gonna do what, $15, $16 million or billion, sorry, billion of revenue and EBITDA of like $8 billion. And so that's pretty impressive. That's impressive for a launch company, which of course 60 to 70% of those revenues and financial contribution, probably higher on the cash flow side, comes from Starlink. And so the next big extension for them to justify Starship, because again, there's not going to be enough customers to send payload up, is to do data centers. And so It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And if you are an investor in AST SpaceMobile or Rocket Lab or some of these other companies, you're in the right place. And it's something, you know, we always say it's better to be lucky than smart. We probably are quite lucky because, or I can say I'm lucky because when I saw the tweets about, and StarCloud CEO talking about data centers in space, back in, maybe it was like October or September, I poo-pooed it. I was like, yeah, whatever. That doesn't make any sense. But then as I peeled the layers of the onion and really dug into it, I was like, oh my God, this is huge. This is going to be big. And I just happened to hold shares in the company that can capitalize on it. And it's something new. And of course, like the company still needs to get its constellation up, But it's well positioned to take the next step. And I've actually told the company this. I've said, hey, I think you guys should, if you already haven't, you should form a group, a skunkworks group to focus solely on this, of taking, leveraging Bluebird technology and everything that you've learned and start thinking about the next step, which is AI data centers. And the company, To their credit, they've already, when we talk about Block 2 and Block 3, they've already iterated on generations that are 3, 4 out already. And this is, I know this because I was, I've talked with the company about it. Maybe it was like 2 years ago and they're like, hey, well, you know, you guys are focused on this next generation. We're already thinking 4 or 5 generations out. And so I would not be surprised if they weren't already doing this. And I tweeted before, you know, Scott had mentioned. The fact that they're vertically integrated, they have all the building blocks where they can do data centers in space. And so it's not as if it's an aha moment where I'm coming to them or some random Twitter people are coming to them and say, hey, you should do this. And they're like, oh yeah, that's great. Yes. Good idea. We're going to do it. They're already doing it. They're already doing it. And so that's where, again, when it comes to the market, When people, it's like the skeptics and they're like, oh, this company only did $14 million of revenue. And of course, yeah, everybody values companies based off of historic results, right? I'm joking, by the way. But they see a description in Bloomberg or they have a very minor understanding of the company. They've done their 5-minute due diligence, but what they don't understand is if you dig a bit deeper, it's like, oh, this is Nvidia doing gaming graphics cards back in the '90s. And that's their level of understanding where it's like, no, actually Nvidia GPUs are going to become the brains and the power, the processing power behind the AI revolution. You've got to think bigger. You've got to look beyond your nose. You've got to be able to understand where the puck is going and what that means. And yeah, I think for those people who are involved in the space sector, it's a very exciting time. Like 2026 is going to be the year and you've got, I sound like a broken record, but you've got the Trump administration that is focused on American superiority in space. You've got all these tailwinds. You've got, of course, SpaceX going public. That's going to educate Pretty much the entire institutional investor universe about space, most of which have poo-pooed it and looked away and like, eh, it's a niche area. It's not. You've got the largest IPO coming to market for a company that's going to be $1.5 trillion in value, which may or may not also be attached to XAI or Tesla, which then takes that to more like $3 trillion, $2 to $3 trillion. Depending on which they merge with, if they do. And so that institutional shareholder base is going to be turned on to these other names. And of course they're going to look at them and say, well, and the initial reaction is for the ones who are small-minded, it's like, oh, but SpaceX is going to win everything, so I'm not going to touch these things. Whereas the others who actually use their brain will understand, Oh, this is not a winner-take-all market and there's going to be multiple players. There's going to be the Elon vertically integrated stack, and then you're going to have everybody else. And these everybody else's, they're not tiny companies. You've got Google, you've got Apple, you've got Microsoft, you've got OpenAI. You got a whole host of players. Meta. I didn't even talk about Meta. And so they're going to need space expertise. And none of those companies today do anything in space. I mean, they do it through partnerships, but I mean, just look at like Meta and Google when they tried to provide internet from high-altitude balloons. Like that was, in my opinion, a pretty harebrained idea, but they're going to need somebody who knows what they're doing in space. And so I mentioned this in a tweet this past week, like there's going to be large investments, large partnerships with space companies. And I'm not even talking about like the terrestrial data center guys, right? Like IREN, NBIS, CoreWeave, all these companies, like they're all doing stuff down here, but they have no idea what they're doing in space. And so they need to go partner with someone, right? Because they are, if they, you know, they have the expertise in certain areas, but they're I don't know how much you can parlay that into doing space applications. And so there'll, I mean, you hear it here first, like there's going to be partnerships that arise from those particular companies with space companies. And then also the carriers too. Like, so whether that's AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, all these companies, they all do data center stuff now. They provide interconnectivity, they do hosting, all that. Oh, hey, this company is DSpace Mobile that I'm already working with. Like they can help me get to space. And so, yeah, the possibilities are endless. And so that's where guys like, and gals like you and me, retail, we can, we're not looking at quarter to quarter performance and fluctuation of what a company's doing. We actually are able to see and have that that moment of clarity where we can see the future, like what's going to happen, right? And so that's where you have companies that, you know, when ASD was at $2, no one could see beyond their nose. But for those that stuck with it and understood the enormity of the opportunity, and this is again, just a handful of applications that's becoming a reality. And then And then once the company builds that foundation, and of course they've raised the capital, they've built production capacity, then they can attack the other areas of opportunity. And so with that, I'll end this talk now. I've got the whole rest of the day that I gotta take care, do some stuff with the family. I'm not saying that that's a burden or anything, but yeah, I woke up this morning, I had some ideas, I was like, I need to do a space. But yeah, I think the noise and the drumbeat around data centers in space is going to become louder and louder. It's going to become inevitable. Like we talk about with AST services, inevitable. It's coming. And so I think what I had talked about before about the ingredients going into the IPO for SpaceX, I think the stock price is going to start discounting a lot more than even even I expect. And so that's where you go, you know, credit to Professor Kevin Mack of Stanford, where he talked about AST potentially reaching S-rank cult status. I think that's possible. And so when you have that, where people start ascribing value for these huge growth areas that people can see that consensus does not, that's where things can get you know, in our mind, or how we, I guess people label it, that's where things can get crazy. So I'll end it there. Hope everyone is having a great weekend and we'll catch up again soon. I'll probably have more stuff to say and I'm hoping to spend more research time on this area. But yeah, it's exciting. I'm looking forward to next week. I know we ended January kind of poorly in terms of the overall markets, but I do I'm very optimistic about the future and especially for the space sector, for renewable energy. I know people hate saying renewable, but solar I think is going to be the place to be. And yeah, so space and solar, the 2 S's, I think that's where you want to, for big markets where you want to lay your bets. But thanks everyone for joining and we'll talk again soon.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: Take care. Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology, we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality. Always in partnership with the animals. Listen. Mmm, waffles.