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"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." This is u
by wmeredith 3mo ago
"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
This is unhinged.
- re-thc 3mo ago> sees an addressable market for AI products Well if you start adding AI powered to "everything" then it is possible. Soon you'll have AI face cream and AI donuts.
- emsign 3mo agoMarks believe anything the con tells them as long as it's promising big money ROI.
- Aeolun 3mo ago> This is unhinged. Just like the investors :D
- TrackerFF 3mo agoI know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion. So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet. They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
- darkerside 3mo agoI'm sure the finance market is much larger as well
- f6v 3mo ago> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet. It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
- TrackerFF 3mo agoRemove 20% of AI supply, and the world goes on like nothing happened. Remove 20% of food supply, and watch prices explode, global unrest, and famine take place.
- porridgeraisin 3mo agoValuation and elasticity of demand not related even if you ignore consumer surplus
- zamadatix 3mo agoI don't think anyone is claiming AI and food have the same elasticity of demand, which is what this really talks to, but, after a claim the AI market is 26 trillion dollars... I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.
- zoom6628 3mo agoWe could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype. Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine. #startflamingmenow
- thewebguyd 3mo agoI half agree, but I'd still had software development to the list. AI is useful as a search & information synthesis tool, and as a dev tool. The problem is, when has a dev tool ever command such ridiculous valuations and investment in infrastructure? The market is going to realize that yes, it's useful, but no, it's not over $1T useful.
- anuramat 3mo ago> dev tool do you expect people to quit research for some reason?
- 3mo ago
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoFood is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy. AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won. (Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
- bcrl 3mo agoWhat precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial. This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
- yifanl 3mo agoBecause there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI. There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?
- jackyinger 3mo agoThis is an insane take. Of course there are other areas that are growing or could grow if there was investment. The problem is an absolute lack of vision on the part of those holding the capital. Meeting the challenges of climate change could hold huge opportunities. Look at China’s massive expansion in renewables, look at the expansion of renewables in the US despite political headwinds. Have some imagination, break out of your echo chamber. AI ain’t the only game to be played.
- mekdoonggi 3mo agoIt's not lack of vision. It's that capital demands gambling. Everyone knows you could plough money into big projects in the US and double your money reliably. But the powers that be do not want that. They want to gamble, and try to become trillionaire #2.
- jackyinger 3mo ago
- lumost 3mo agoThis is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration. It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
- ben_w 3mo ago> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future. Sure there is. 1. The cost of each new generation of training runs appears to be rapidly rising 2. The Trump admin just told the leading model to stop making it available to non-Americans, which in practice meant stop providing it at all 3. The factories to make the hardware are hitting bottlenecks, and while they've currently been navigated around, there's never a guarantee the next one will be Currently I'm wondering at what point the direct impact on the US energy supply gives the US a taste of Baumol's cost disease as AI companies continue to outbid everyone else for electricity.
- pixl97 3mo agoThere are some counters to this, especially in electricity. We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
- ben_w 3mo ago> We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it. Implausible while Trump remains in office. He hates renewables, shuts them down even when doing so actively costs money. Between AI hallucinated content and the politicisation of the numbers, I'm not sure how much AI compute capacity is being planned right now; would you accept a claim of 300 GW? It's a number I heard recently. Given the capacity factor of PV, even China would have to think carefully before supplying that much PV over the next few years (300 GW avg ~= 3TW nameplate). (Not sure about wind, wind's CF seems to vary between years).
- ai-x 3mo agoI'm sure people laughed in 2023 if someone said AI will reach $100B in revenue in 3 years. Yet here we are
- noncoml 3mo ago“ai-x”? Elon? You know that you are not allowed to in this forum. It’s only for adults. Go back to Twitter and play with the other kids.
- sph 3mo agoPast performance is not guarantee of future returns.
- Alive-in-2025 3mo agoWe'll figure out how to make it much much cheaper to produce the compute needs we have today with tokens. The question is will how many new use cases arise that need much more - clearly we aren't meeting needs (price stays high) but how much more do we need, 100x, 10x, 10^6 x? Look at electricity, the world of 1900 could not create enough electricity or even conceive of how to add enough to meet 1950s needs. But we made it incredibly cheaper to produce, but also created a lot more, and boy do we have so much more use of electricity now. And it's not that expensive for a human to pay for their needs (not free, its not cheap for poor people but it's still gotten cheaper).
- nobody_r_knows 3mo ago[dead]
- marcosdumay 3mo agoOh, that puts it 0.3% of the way there! And all it cost was increasing prices until every customer started talking about cutting it.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ralfd 3mo agoTo be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food. How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?
- fckgw 3mo agoYou are not in any way the average person. Food is the 3rd largest expenditure in most households, after housing and transportation.
- imron 3mo ago> They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate. Why limit yourself to one planet? Space is infinite ;-)
- firecall 3mo agoWhere is that quote from? I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- thinkingtoilet 3mo agoIn a sensible world, this would be considered lying to investors and be prosecuted.
- ActionHank 3mo agoAlways fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month. The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.
- DebtDeflation 3mo agoThere have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.
- rustystump 3mo agoThey are pricing in inflation along with the inevitable money printing that will happen.
- prennert 3mo agoI call it forward thinking: they assume massive inflation due to income taxes breaking away.
- remix2000 3mo agoDunno the actual number, but one thing I'm certain is that it must be closer to $0 than $26 trillion on a number scale.
- boothby 3mo ago>> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." > This is unhinged. The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!
- TrainedMonkey 3mo agoBe honest now, it would take at least a few months for the rest of us.
- chimpanzee2 3mo agoyea, totally nuts. clearly it's more like $540.2 quintillion at this point
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fredophile 3mo agoI also saw a quote from Musk saying that he expects SpaceX to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2031. Given his track record of predicting performance I think it's safe to ignore such future looking statements from him or companies he controls.
- jmalicki 3mo agoAnother way of putting this: global GDP is ~$132Trillion from what I gather. So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%. The Federal Reserve says AI is contributing about 1% GDP growth per year to the US [0]. So maybe you can get to $13 trillion over a decade just from that. If you assume some acceleration, 20% isn't out of the question. It is an extremely rosy projection, but if AI can replicate large fractions of the workforce, leaving those humans with the ability to work on other things, it doesn't seem unhinged when you think of it through this lens, just very optimistic - not Elon Musk level optimistic, just "everything goes according to plan and a bunch of things in the causal chain are all slightly on the higher end." [0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/tracking-ai-contribution-gdp-growth https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/tracking-...
- marcosdumay 3mo ago> So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%. No business gets to capture 100% of the value it produces without physical coercion. For infrastructure that requires high investment, it usually captures something around 5% of it. People tend to work really hard to replace or reduce any kind of infrastructure that gets near 10%. So we are talking about AIs increasing the global GDP by 200% at minimum, 400% more realistically. Or in other words, bullshit number is bullshit.
- slashdev 3mo agoOver what period of time? By 2030? No way By 2050? Maybe? Obviously during an IPO you’re trying to make the bull case (unhinged or not). What does it look like in the best case scenario.
- rayiner 3mo agoYou need to understand the definition of “total addressable market.” It’s a maximum theoretical number for the size of the market (not your company’s revenue) under ideal assumptions. A $26 trillion TAM is high but it’s not “unhinged.” For example, the logistics and transportation market is over $10 trillion and expected to double by 2035. Under ideal assumptions, if AI replaces everything from coders to lawyers, why is that “unhinged?”
- yks 3mo agoWith SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)
- nobody_r_knows 3mo ago[dead]