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All-In · 3 min · Sep 15, 2026

Compute rental demand is holding while Starlink has room to grow

Gwynne Shotwell puts Starlink penetration at 1.5% to 2% by country and calls compute rental a strong business with no demand drop. The figures point to two distinct growth engines.

Gwynne Shotwell

President & COO, SpaceX

SpaceX's president and chief operating officer since 2008, who runs the company day to day.

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David Sacks, Host · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

    PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

About this segment

Gwynne Shotwell puts Starlink penetration at 1.5% to 2% by country and calls compute rental a strong business with no demand drop. The figures point to two distinct growth engines.

From “Elon Musk & Gwynne Shotwell on AI Risks and Peer Review, Starship, Terafab, SpaceX/Tesla Merger”, Sep 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We don't see any drop. We see no drop in demand at all.”
Gwynne Shotwellat 12:32 · All-In12:32

Takeaways

  1. Starlink penetration is 1.5% to 2%, depending on the country.
  2. Shotwell says Starlink has substantial room to grow.
  3. She reports no drop in compute-rental demand.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 28:51AI companies should test one another’s models6:37
  2. 41:58Starship aims for rapid, full reusability4:19
  3. 46:03Terafab is meant to secure future chip supply5:03
  4. 21:58SpaceX gives proven hires hard problems and clears their path5:07
  5. 1:25SpaceX won early customers by fixing a weak launch market5:40

  6. 10:48Compute rental demand is holding while Starlink has room to grow2:39

  7. 18:21SpaceX sees orbit as a faster site for AI compute3:38Up next
  8. 39:28SpaceX raises rocket problems early because physics will expose them2:46

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 11:00

    before the XAI acquisition. It's like, oh my God, we're going to spend $100 million on an air separation unit and I was like, oh, $100 million, a billion. When you look at the the kind of schedule of all of this over the next few years, does the capital for that sit on the balance sheet? Is it going to come from cash flows from Starlink? Or do you have to go back to the markets to get more capital? I mean, how do you think about where the capital comes from?

  2. 11:28

    I have, I don't think anyone doubts the capacity to execute and deliver, or some people might, but I think generally the markets will say yes. But where does that capital come from? So it will come from, I would say the answer to the above is yes. I don't think we're going to, I don't think we're going to release any more stock. And by the way, I don't plan on making any news on this. That's like the one downside of a public company.

  3. 11:53

    They told me all the things that I could. And I'm like, I'm going to forget one for sure. Maybe we're going to make some news. But it will be all of the above. And Starlink, I mean, is Starlink, in your view, kind of the core cash generation engine for the next couple of years for the business? Or is it compute? Or is it a mix, again, of all the above? Like, how do you think about? So Starlink is definitely carrying its own weight, but we have a lot to go, right?

  4. 12:19

    Our market penetration on Starlink is 1.5% to 2%, depending on which country you're in. So there's a lot of headroom there. Our revenue, compared to what we do for the U.S. military, our revenue is very small. So we expect lots of headroom there. But honestly, right now, and it is a little embarrassing, but computer rental, it's a heck of a business. Does that persist, you think, or is it? We don't see any drop.

  5. 12:46

    We see no drop in demand at all. This is tens of billions of dollars per quarter in build-out, and these are a new customer base for you. Is this the business now? Is this like, what percentage of the revenue is Elon Web Services at this point? It's a lot, it's a lot. I think we'll probably do some announcement quickly. Oh, right, public again. Yeah, public. Well, let's move on to something less controversial then.

  6. 13:15

    What other companies are you planning on buying?