Data Center Space Race
Slate Technology
Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While the A.I. boom has created a data center boom, rich guys are turning their computing dreams to the skies. With its impending IPO, SpaceX stands to lead the extraterrestrial data center boom. Will it work out for Elon and company?
Guest: Eric Berger, space reporter at Ars Technica
Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, it's Lizzie. So it may not come as a surprise to you to hear that I am a touch |
| 0:06.8 | competitive, competitive to the degree that some members of my family will no longer play |
| 0:12.4 | Scrabble with me. So this means that as Slate does our little winter pledge drive, I am asking you |
| 0:19.6 | our listeners to sign up for Slate Plus. |
| 0:23.2 | I want to beat the other hosts. And that means getting our listeners, our community, to have |
| 0:28.7 | the most people join Slate Plus. And when you do that, you get all sorts of awesome member goodies |
| 0:35.0 | like ad-free shows, bonus episodes, community events like |
| 0:38.9 | our meme coin Zoom, and you never hit a paywall on the Slate site. |
| 0:44.0 | And right now, till the end of this year, membership with Slate Plus is half off. |
| 0:48.6 | It's a full year of slate for 59 bucks. |
| 0:51.5 | But there is a problem. |
| 0:53.6 | Well, there are two of them, actually, and their names are Dahlia Lithwick |
| 0:57.5 | and Mark Joseph Stern, because right now, Amicus is currently sitting at the top of the Slate Plus |
| 1:03.4 | sign-up leaderboard, and I want to take them down. All you have to do to help our TBD community win is go to slate.com slash TBD Plus and enter the code TBD50. |
| 1:16.5 | That is slate.com slash TBD Plus and the code TBD50. |
| 1:21.9 | Let's wipe the floor with the other Slate shows. |
| 1:25.1 | Okay. |
| 1:25.6 | Here's the show. |
| 1:31.0 | Data Slaidavis. the other Slate shows. Okay, here's the show. Data Centers in Space is one of the more out-there concepts that you might have heard about |
| 1:36.3 | recently. But all of a sudden, a lot of the people we cover on this show are talking about |
| 1:42.3 | them. It seems like it's happened really quickly. |
| 1:46.8 | Eric Berger writes a lot about space, and he started hearing about the idea maybe a year or two ago. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

