Nvidia-Backed Starcloud's CEO Says SpaceX IPO Could Be ‘Most Undervalued IPO of All Time’ and Tear Through $10 Trillion
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Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA)-backed Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston believes SpaceX’s (NASDAQ:SPCX) eventual IPO could be remembered as "the most undervalued IPO of all time," predicting Elon Musk’s rocket company could exceed $10 trillion in market value as it becomes core infrastructure for space-based businesses.
Johnston Sees SpaceX As Core Infrastructure
Johnston made the comments on Wednesday in an interview with Molly O’Shea, a former venture capitalist turned full-time media creator. "The SpaceX IPO is gonna be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time," Johnston said.
He forecast explosive growth for SpaceX, saying, "I think they will tear through $10 trillion within, certainly within the next couple of years, & then have almost unlimited TAM for what they’re building." TAM refers to total addressable market, or the full revenue opportunity a company could eventually pursue.
Johnston said much of the emerging space economy will depend on Musk’s company. "Everything else is gonna have to go through SpaceX," he said. He compared SpaceX to the railroads, saying many businesses will be built on top of it, "but the railroads are a great business to own, for sure."
Starcloud Builds Around SpaceX Launch Network
Starcloud builds orbital AI data centers, using space-based solar power and radiative cooling to address the rising energy demands of artificial intelligence. The company says falling launch costs could let data centers in orbit scale rapidly while avoiding land and permitting constraints on Earth.
The company’s relationship with SpaceX is central to that vision. Starcloud’s first satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Nov. 2, 2025, carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU and running AI workloads in orbit. Future Starcloud payloads are expected to rely more heavily on Starship, SpaceX’s larger next-generation rocket.
Johnston said Starcloud remains flexible on hardware. "We welcome all chips.. we are chip agnostic," he said. He added that Starcloud is speaking with SambaNova and wants to fly chips from both SambaNova and Cerebras Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CBRS). He also said, "Within NVIDIA, the Groq architecture actually can be potentially well-suited for space as well."
Starcloud Scales Toward Starship-Sized Payloads
Starcloud has moved quickly. Reuters reported in March that the startup raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, with partners including Nvidia and the cloud units of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Y Combinator says Starcloud became the fastest unicorn in its history, 17 months after demo day, and is developing Starcloud-3, a larger spacecraft designed for Starship. Johnston said the company is building a campus for a manufacturing line and could fit up to 10 megawatts of compute capacity per Starship launch.
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