SpaceX, Howmet: Two ways to kill data centers on earth? Our Bernstein Data Center Day presentation

Bernstein held its first Data Center Day this week, bringing together Bernstein analysts from multiple sectors along with industry experts to discuss all aspects of the growing data center industry. There were seven analyst Best Ideas presentations; here we provide our presentation, which focused on two investment ideas, SpaceX and Howmet. Each of these companies has the potential to limit terrestrial data center growth. We rate each Outperform. SpaceX, with its IPO, is working to put a large constellation of data center satellites in space on sun-synchronous orbits. Depending on the growth of compute demand, this massive amount of new compute resource could limit the amount of terrestrial data center capacity needed. Terrestrial capacity will still be needed for very low latency work (e.g., high-frequency trading) and training. SpaceX's ability to place this compute capacity in space will depend on ramping up its launch program, particularly with fully reusable rockets. In addition, S