Google is in talks with SpaceX for a rocket-launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A launch deal would put the two companies in partnership as they gear up to compete on orbital data centers, an unproven technology that SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk has said is the next frontier for his rocket company.
Google is also in discussions about a potential deal with other rocket-launch companies, one of the people said.
The speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX’s pitch to investors ahead of its planned public listing this summer, which is anticipated to be the largest IPO of all time.
Last year, Google announced its own plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It’s working with another company, Planet Labs, to build those satellites.
“We’ll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview in November. “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers.”
Google was an early investor in SpaceX and owns 6.1% of the company, according to a regulatory filing. Google executive Don Harrison sits on the board of SpaceX.
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX is the leading commercial launch provider, which means anyone looking to launch satellites has to weigh working with the company.
The company last week announced a deal to sell Earthbound computing resources to the AI company Anthropic. As part of the agreement, Anthropic expressed interest in working with SpaceX on orbital data centers. Earlier this year, SpaceX filed an application with a federal regulator to launch up to a million satellites for its orbital data-center ambitions.
Many industry leaders see orbital computing as a solution to the limitations of Earthbound data centers, which require swaths of land and power. These data centers are designed to be powered by solar panels, eliminating the power constraint faced by data centers on Earth, and one of the major ecological issues with the emerging technology. But there are also major engineering challenges that have made some industry experts skeptical about their feasibility.
SpaceX made its name as the world’s leading private launch provider, sending NASA astronauts to the space station and launching thousands of satellites as part of its Starlink internet constellation. It also sends satellites to space for paying customers.
As it prepares to go public, SpaceX has struck a number of deals that have rewritten its balance sheet. Some helped Musk consolidate his companies, including its acquisition of xAI, which valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX also announced a close partnership with the AI coding startup Cursor. As part of the deal, SpaceX secured the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year. It has separately announced billions of dollars in planned infrastructure spending.
For its deal with Anthropic, SpaceX will supply 300 megawatts of new computing capacity, using more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, by the end of May.
