In July 2025, a startup called Varda Space Industries raised $187 million to make drugs in orbit. They are not the only startup trying to make stuff in space. Starcloud - formerly called Lumen Orbit - raised $21 million to try and assemble a 5-gigawatt data center in space. And tech giants Elon and Bezos have been talking a great deal about putting AI data centers in space. A few people on the internet have riffed off those trends and ideas to also ask, “Why not do semiconductors in space too?”. Bezos himself said all the way back in 2016: “We can build gigantic chip factories in space”. Sure we can. But it’s not going to be practical. In this video, Jon spends way too much time on space fabs.
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