Dan Ives, the Yorkville Ives partner and veteran Wall Street technology analyst, said late on Sunday that the United States could add 800 to 1,000 data centres over the next several years — a forecast that casts SpaceX’s newly scaled artificial-intelligence business as a serious contender in the fight for computing capacity. “We estimate there will be another 800-1,000 datacenters built in the US over the next few years,” Ives wrote on X on October 25, calling the contest to secure compute power a “Game of Thrones battle” between SpaceX, specialist cloud operators and established cloud platforms.

The projection is an analyst estimate rather than a published industry forecast, and Ives has used varying timelines and political-risk assumptions. In a Bloomberg Surveillance interview on October 23, he said 5% to 10% of projects could be pushed back or voted down as the November 3 midterm elections approached. In an earlier CNBC interview reported by Yahoo Finance on September 9, he said 1,000 to 1,500 US projects were already “in motion” and applied a 10% to 15% potential cut.

Even allowing for those reductions, Ives’s conclusion is that the AI infrastructure boom will remain enormous. The immediate question for investors is less whether more buildings are planned than which companies can finance, power and complete them before customers take their workloads elsewhere.

SpaceX moves from

AI customer to capacity seller SpaceX’s third-quarter results, released on October 20, offer the clearest evidence yet that the company’s Super Intelligence unit is becoming a cloud business alongside its launch and connectivity operations. The company reported $14.58bn in quarterly revenue, up 161% from a year earlier, and net income of $4.4bn, against a $1.1bn loss a year earlier. Super Intelligence, the former xAI operation, generated $7.56bn in revenue, up from $813m, largely by renting computing capacity.

Reuters reported that customers include Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI, putting the business closer to a cloud provider than a conventional AI laboratory. Nameplate compute capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts at the end of September, up from 1.4GW in June and 0.6GW a year earlier. SpaceX has said it is building out Colossus II in the Memphis and Southaven area and is targeting 2.5GW to 3GW by the end of the fourth quarter.

The spending required is correspondingly large. SpaceX invested $19.6bn in the third quarter, including $16.4bn on AI, and guided to $35bn to $40bn in fourth-quarter capital expenditure. It forecast first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33bn to $37bn, well above the roughly $22.2bn consensus cited by CNBC and LSEG.

Musk has said the company intends to deploy power and cooling infrastructure faster than rivals. That remains a company claim, but the revenue, capacity and capital-expenditure figures show why Ives now places SpaceX in the same infrastructure contest as the neoclouds and the established hyperscalers.

Debt markets impose a different discipline

The specialist operators Ives has set against SpaceX face a harder financing test. CoreWeave has accumulated more than $51bn in debt and obligations, CNBC reported on October 15. The yield on its 2031 bond reached 15.78%, while five-year credit-default swaps rose above 1,000 basis points, a level S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Gavan Nolan described as distress.

CoreWeave’s shares were down 36% in October as of October 21, CNBC reported; Nebius had fallen 33% and IREN 38%. Andrew Keches, a Barclays credit analyst, told CNBC that sentiment was “decidedly negative”. Max Frumes of 9fin told Reuters on October 16 that CoreWeave was “absolutely the canary in the coal mine.” Ives has argued that capacity owned by any failing neocloud would be acquired rather than abandoned.

That outcome would favour companies with cash flow and balance-sheet access, although SpaceX is not free of leverage: CNBC reported that its debt and finance leases reached $36.8bn in the second quarter.

The power problem reaches the ballot box

Construction also depends on communities willing to host data centres and the power systems behind them. S&P Global counted 34 data-centre ballot measures for November, while 451 Research identified 3,173 operating US facilities and 1,140 planned projects. Politico reported on October 13 that nearly 160 US projects had been paused or cancelled since 2024.

The resistance carries consequences for SpaceX as well. A federal judge in Mississippi this month rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to dismiss the NAACP’s Clean Air Act lawsuit concerning gas turbines powering the Colossus sites. The NAACP alleges improper permitting and pollution controls; the court has made no finding that SpaceX violated the law.

Norway illustrates how quickly capacity schedules can slip. Bloomberg and Finansavisen reported this month that Nscale’s Glomfjord site, part of Stargate Norway, is six months behind schedule after cooling leaks, permitting problems, a fire and construction delays. Only 6.4MW of a planned 30MW was operating.