Musk projects at least 13 gigawatts of AI compute by end of next year

Elon Musk says his AI operation will be running on at least 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year. For scale, the current figure is 1.7 GW. Musk laid out the underlying numbers in more detail on SpaceX’s Q3 2026 earnings call on October 20, and those numbers describe SpaceX’s own AI buildout. The goal is a roughly sevenfold jump in about 15 months. The math behind 13 gigawatts On the call, Musk pointed to a potential increase of approximately 10 GW in 2027. That would lift total compute capacity to around 13 GW by year-end. SpaceX’s AI compute capacity stood at 1.7 GW as of September 30, 2026, up from 1.4 GW in Q2. The near-term target is more than 2 GW by the end of 2026. Hitting 13 GW a year later means the buildout has to accelerate dramatically. From Q2 to Q3, capacity grew by about 0.3 GW. The 2027 plan calls for roughly 10 GW in a single year, which works out to about 2.5 GW per quarter if spread evenly. Nvidia chips, by the hundreds of thousands Musk said SpaceX is installing about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs every month for the rest of 2026. After that, the deployment is expected to shift toward Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin architecture. The headline project is a la...