In the AI trade, everyone wants to know what a gigawatt is worth.
Thanks to a chart buried on page 7 of Goldman's latest SpaceX note, we now have an answer, or rather three of them: $40-50 billion a year if you rent it out short-term, $20-30 billion if you rent it out long-term, and roughly $12 billion if you're a hyperscaler who simply needs to earn a decent return on it. The gap between those numbers is where the entire debate over AI revenues, and the $1+ trillion a year of capex now chasing them, really lives.
Here is the chart in question, from Goldman internet analyst Eric Sheridan's Q3 preview of SpaceX (SPCX) published on Monday (available to pro subs):
Source: GoldmanThe navy bars are short-term capacity deals, the light blue ones are long-term hosting contracts. And the message is unambiguous: right now, compute is so scarce that whoever owns a powered, GPU-filled data hall can name their price... as long as the buyer only has to commit for a few months.
Regular readers know we have been warning since last October that the AI buildout runs on debt, and more recently that it runs on revenue numbers nobody can quite pin down. Below we walk through what the neocloud rate card tells us about the economics of AI compute, why it can't be extrapolated to the rest of the bui
