Tremendous respect for
@GavinSBaker @altcap @_clarktang & their teams. One of the best pods of the year.
SpaceX becomes hyperscaler #4 in record time
-Effectively went from not focused on it to the #4 in roughly ~30 days, past Oracle and others, on the Google and Anthropic cloud deals alone
-Google deal implies ~$50B revenue/GW, Anthropic ~$25B/GW, against a bank base case of $14B/GW
-Added ~$29B of run-rate in a month, taking the multiple from ~100x trailing revenue to ~39x [shows how savy Elon & Gwynne are at striking deals]
-Core edge is build speed: Colossus 1 in 122 days, and speed compounds because idle construction is pure labor cost on already strained workforce
-AWS analogy holds loosely, but they enter a market where AWS, Azure, GCP, CoreWeave and Oracle already fight for the same dollars
Terrestrial data center math
-Freda Duan bottom-up: 325k Nvidia GPUs across Colossus 1 and 2, blended $5.33/hr, ~590MW facility power at 1.2 PUE for the Anthropic deal
-Implies ~$25B revenue/GW against ~$29B/GW to build (ARK estimate of Colossus costs)
-Payback near 1.2 years before opex, 55% IRR if the contract renews [on Colossus 1]
-Elon flagged the Anthropic deals short term, and the $8/hr GB200 rate for Colossus 2 compresses as supply expands, which the bull case underweights
-The $50B /GW Google figure has no equivalent bottom-up build, it sits as a residual on the scatter plot [one thing I thought was interesting, though, by their own admission Google is likely buying optionality to be first on the orbital DCs IF they work and come online fast enough so anchoring to the same revenue/GW they signed at doesn't seem like a usable datapoint and is rather an outlier given it's a call option]
Orbital compute
-Fox puts orbital capex at ~$5B/GW versus $20-25B/GW terrestrially, a 5x cut on roughly half the bill of materials
-Built off 100 tons and ~5MW of compute per Starship launch at a $250/kg target, versus ~$1,500/kg on Falcon today
-Requires two-stage reusability, never demonstrated, with a second-stage return attempt later this year
-Ignores satellite failure rates, radiative cooling mass and orbital power intermittency in LEO
Nvidia share
-Altimeter's own chart steps Nvidia 2026 to 2027E down across all three lenses: revenue 79% to 72%, GW share 64% to 46%, unit 50% to 32%, with the 2027 column flagged with a question mark.
-GW share falls harder, 64% to a projected 46%, and unit share drops 47% to 32%
-Revenue share holds up better than units because Nvidia chips cost more, so ASIC unit gains don't convert to dollar losses one for one
-Baker's "maintained share handsomely" line is softer than the Altimeter slide, and the 2027 step down assumes ASIC ramp at a pace with no precedent
-Jensen's argument: tokens per watt is revenue, so a cheaper ASIC saves capex but yields less revenue in a watt-constrained world
Model frontier economics
-Inference ARR went $29B (Dec-25) to $83B (Apr-26), roughly 3x in five months
-Internal estimates of $155B at year-end 2026, $300B in 2027, $500B in 2028, with the outer years top-down and provider mix unallocated
-Morgan Stanley 2027 capex at $1.1T, Gerstner closer to $1.5T including SpaceX and CoreWeave
-At 60-70% gross margin the capex against revenue maths, but the $300B and $500B targets carry no bottom-up build
-Monetization per GW is rising from ~$20B to $30-40B, what they call accidental profitability from demand outrunning supply [think this is the biggest jump in assumptions]
Frontier versus open source
-Closed frontier models captured roughly 90% of AI economic value in H1 2026, against consensus that cheap open-source tokens would converge
-Baker's split: frontier keeps the revenue, open source takes most of the tokens
-Harvey example: an open-source base plus proprietary RL and a router beat Opus 4 at lower cost, while still consuming heavy Opus volume
-Stronger open source is bullish for compute because it pushes margin out of models and into hardware
-Jensen could ship a frontier open-source model whenever he chose, Nemotron is already efficient, so it reads as a business choice not a capability limit