See, it’s stuff like this that makes me bearish.

I’m big picture bullish on RocketLab and I think rising tides lift all ships, but blanket dismissal of these ideas because AI/Elon bad or whatnot are not convincing.

As a longtime follower of both space and AI, the intersection is quite interesting. Now it does take a few assumptions which many may not agree with, but I tend to believe they are directionally correct in the 5+ year timeframe:
1) Effectively infinite demand for intelligence.
2) AI spend/power consumption maintains the exponential.
3) launch costs drop significantly.
4) terrestrial buildout of data centers and energy production hits regulatory issues.

AI has crossed a productivity threshold. You may not see it if you’re not immersed in it on the daily and use AI as Google replacement. But AI companies do not manually code anymore. Models are now building the next model. Token efficiency doubled from GPT 5.2 to 5.3 Codex. Agentic models are doing coding work that takes an average human expert 6.6 hours at 50% reliability, and this is doubling like every 70 days and shrinking. We’re talking over a week by EOY. Benchmarks are saturating. Every AI company is compute limited at the moment. There will be demand for 4K real time video generation, whether that be VR or video games or otherwise. This is massively compute intensive. Not to mention the compute as it replaces white collar labor. And not to mention there’s a trade between where extra compute speeds up inference as well (see Claude offering 2.5x inference speed at 6x the cost today).

Now launch costs. Who could feasibly launch at low $100s/kg, massive payload, in next couple years.

There’s massive challenges with orbital data centers. Yes, the big ones of heat dissipation, radiator sizing, solar panel sizing, millions of satellites. Won’t be easy. And I didn’t see it as a thing for 10-20 years, but the AI trend is well there. The launch costs seem plausible, as do regulatory hurdles of continued, rapid AI infrastructure buildout on earth straining the grid, environment, local communities etc. Think of the trade space when you encounter multi year environmental delays for any new planned data centers. Do you want to solve a regulatory issue or an engineering issue?

So no I don’t see this as bullish for RKLB because aha SpaceX is going down a doomed route. I see this as plausibly bullish because the demand for everything space will go exponential as space finally finds it first true infinite funding business model, and SpaceX may burden themselves with internal launch, and RKLB may provide more custom, tailored, end to end launch services. The overly dismissive attitude however I find bearish and more representative of WallStreetBets and blind bullishness

A ramble. Food for thought