Squawk Pod · Oct 21, 2026
With Brad Gerstner, Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital · Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines · Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman of Fountain 0 and Claigrid, CNBC Contributor · JJ Kinahan, Senior Vice President of Retail and Alternative Investments at Cboe Global Markets
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
SpaceX is standing up 200,000 of Nvidia's GB300 chips a month, and Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, told Andrew Ross Sorkin on Squawk Pod that it will account for about a quarter of all the computing capacity going up in the US next year. The episode also carried United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, media executive Tom Rogers and Cboe's JJ Kinahan.
Bears have spent two years warning of a glut in AI computing. Brad reads the SpaceX numbers the opposite way: as a sign that Elon Musk believes the world is at the brink of the singularity, and that the winner will be whoever can build the most.
"Whoever has the most scale, capital, compute and data wins the game of superintelligence." — Brad Gerstner
Brad owns shares in both SpaceX and Tesla, sits on Tesla's special committee, and founded Invest America, the program now known as Trump Accounts, so he spoke on the merger, the IPOs and the policy from inside all three.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 11 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
SpaceX alone will build 25% of the gigawatts of compute going up in the US next year, by Brad's count
A Tesla-SpaceX deal should carry a higher premium than usual because Musk sits on both sides
Anthropic could list at $1.5T on 10 times next year's revenue, closer to $2T at 12 times
Brad told the president he can raise $100B for Trump Accounts within 12 months
Brad expects AGI within the next year and calls himself "pro-human"
United absorbed an $8B rise in fuel costs and still expects six to ten US airlines to lose money
YouTube now has twice Netflix's viewer engagement, after the two were level not long ago
1. SpaceX's Compute Shock
Brad called SpaceX's earnings call extraordinary, and the number that struck him was the pace of its chip build-out. Installing that many GB300s used to take a full year, a few months ago.
SpaceX is now installing 200,000 GB300s every month
"We're standing up 200,000 GB300s a month... he's going to do that every single month by the end of the year." — Brad Gerstner
Musk's path runs to 10 gigawatts of compute next year. Against the 43 gigawatts Brad expects to go up across the US, that would make SpaceX alone about a quarter of the total, at a cost of roughly $400 billion that SpaceX will have to raise.
SpaceX alone will build a quarter of new US compute, in Brad's math
"SpaceX alone is going to put up 25% of the total gigawatts going up in the United States." — Brad Gerstner
