This week a new narrative took over investor chatter: data centers in space — unlimited sunlight and free cooling. Back on Earth, where we have neither 24-hour sun nor effortless thermal management, grid storage just blew past its 2025 deployment target.
SpaceX has effectively become the most expensive private company in the world, while the second-largest is showing early signs of user-growth fatigue.
SpaceX IPO and the New Frontier: Datacenters in Space
SpaceX made headlines last Friday with its stated intent to go public in 2026. According to Bloomberg, the company could target a massive $1.5 trillion valuation, potentially raising up to $30 billion in an IPO as soon as mid-to-late 2026.
This ambitious valuation is underpinned by strong financial growth: revenues are expected to hit $15 billion this year and climb to between $22 billion and $24 billion in 2026, with the bulk of that income projected to come from the Starlink satellite internet service. If SpaceX manages to reach $25 billion in revenue next year, the $1.5 trillion valuation would imply a staggering 60x revenue multiple.
To justify such a high 60x multiple and capture investor interest, a compelling new narrative is essential: the development of data centers in space. Much like Elon Musk is framing Tesla as a leader in robotics and robotaxis, positioning SpaceX as the pioneer for launching space-based data centers serves to attract investors who might otherwise be unenthusiastic about its current rocket-launch and internet-access businesses.
This space data center concept is further highlighted by Elon Musk, who points to an interview with investor Gavin Baker on Invest Like The Best. In that episode, Gavin states:
“I think the most important thing that’s going to happen in the world, in this world, in the next three to four years is data centers in space.
In space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day, and the sun is 30% more intense. You can have the satellite always kind of catching the light. The sun is 30% more intense, and this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet earth. So you’re getting a lot of solar energy. Point number two, because you’re in the sun 24 hours a day, you don’t need a battery. And this is a giant percentage of the cost.
In space, cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. And it’s as close to absolute zero as you can get. So all that goes away, and that is a vast amount of cost.”
We’ll definitely see a lot of pros and cons the following year.
Liberty’s Highlights newsletter challenges a major claimed advantage of operating in space: Cooling:
"Let’s skip over radiation-hardening of everything and look at what is claimed to be a huge selling point of being in space: Cooling.
Space is, well, empty.
In a vacuum, you don’t get conduction or convection in air or water to move heat away from your very hot chips. You’re left with thermal radiation, and to do that, you need *a lot* of surface area."
We’ll bet “space datacenters” are the conversation starter at Christmas parties this year. Want some secondary-market ammo? A year ago SpaceX’s private valuation was roughly $250 billion on secondary pricing — anchored in a tender offer in late 2024 that implied that mark. Now the company is reportedly preparing a secondary share sale that could imply an ~$800 billion valuation, which would make it the most valuable private company.
Grid Storage crushed Its 2025 Target
On Earth we still need energy storage — and the industry just proved it. A decade ago an industry group set an aggressive U.S. goal: 35 GW of grid-connected battery capacity by end of 2025. The market didn’t just hit it — it surpassed 40 GW of deployed storage with more to come — and that’s before the year is even over. In Q3 alone, about 4.7 GW of new batteries went live.
Much of that growth is concentrated where grids are under pressure — Arizona, California, and Texas — as utilities lean into storage to balance renewables and demand spikes.
Track these plays: Redwood Materials, Base Power and other energy infrastructure names are riding this transition as storage shifts from niche to core grid capacity.
The Second-Priciest Private Company Meets Slowdown
New data from Sensor Tower shows ChatGPT’s global monthly active user (MAU) growth has decelerated sharply, rising only about 5–6% from August to November 2025, while Google’s Gemini expanded roughly 30% over the same period.
ChatGPT still leads the field, with around 810 million monthly actives and ranking as the #1 downloaded app on the Apple App Store in 2025 across categories.
Revolut Discounts Shares — Just Like the Rest of the Market
Revolut is giving former employees a chance to sell their shares back to the company — and some are surprised to see a discount attached. The offer values each share at $966.74, implying a $52.5 billion valuation — about 30% below Revolut’s $75 billion secondary round completed in November.
It’s perfectly in line with what the secondary market discounts. The broader market: as of December 1st, 2025, our dataset of roughly 300 secondary-active companies shows a median secondary discount closer to –40%.
Harvey launches its first tender offer
The legal-tech firm is running a secondary sale shortly after its $160 million Series F led by Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $8 billion. Early employees finally get a structured liquidity window as Harvey cements itself as one of the fastest-rising enterprise AI players.
Skild AI lines up a massive up-round
The robotics-AI startup is in talks to raise $1 billion+ at a $14 billion valuation from SoftBank and Nvidia — roughly 3× its valuation from earlier this year, when it raised $500 million at $4.2 billion. Skild’s demos — humanoids navigating pallets, stairs, forest terrain, plus robot arms and robot dogs running on its Skild Brain model — have put it squarely in the “frontier robotics” spotlight.
Mistral pushes deeper into coding models
The French AI lab launched Devstral 2, its next-gen coding LLM, aiming to close the gap with Anthropic and other code-focused models. Strong move: Mistral is visibly anchoring itself in the developer ecosystem where practical adoption is exploding.
Google doubles down on geothermal
Google is investing in Fervo Energy’s $462 million Series E, backing new phases of the Cape Station geothermal plant and early development of additional sites. The bet: scalable, always-on clean power for AI loads — a strategic energy hedge as data-center demand spikes.