Stephen Sopko

Liftoff of Starship!

@StevenDickens3 @SpaceX Yep! Can't wait until they start launching from Florida. Giant star factory under construction here...

@stephensopko @SpaceX Excited much?

@SpaceX Starship 12 just 40 minutes out... Lets Go!

Fresh from Dell Tech World, and one thing is clear: AI infrastructure has moved from hype to execution. Michael Dell’s keynote laid out an ambitious vision, but more importantly, a practical one. This wasn’t just about future potential; it was about how enterprises can operationalize AI today. From rack-scale infrastructure and AI-optimized systems to the emergence of AI desktops, Dell is building for end-to-end AI deployment across the enterprise. The real story, though, is the shift from experimentation to production. Several themes stood out: * “Useful AI” over experimental AI * The rise of AI factories as a new operating model * Sovereign AI and data residency are becoming critical design points * A clear push to bring AI infrastructure on-prem and into enterprise-controlled environments This is a notable shift. AI is no longer just the domain of hyperscalers, it is becoming embedded in enterprise data centers, where control, compliance, and performance matter most. Jensen Huang’s appearance on stage reinforced this moment: tightly integrated infrastructure is now central to scaling AI effectively. In this video, I break down what Dell’s strategy signals for the market, and what it means for organizations looking to deploy secure, scalable, and production-ready AI. youtube.com/watch?v=BCO3ej…

Can a Fabless Designer Like Broadcom Reshape EPIC's Innovation Map? First fabless Applied Materials EPIC participant signals expansion beyond chipmaker-focused collaboration as Broadcom's 3.5D XPU roadmap meets Applied's deposition tools. buff.ly/ruy9A08

Everybody I've ever advised that was pre IPO got really really cautious pre IPO so as not to scare investors. @SpaceX? "Let's launch a v3 starship with just about everything changed from v2... From an untried pad... About 5 weeks before the IPO!" #respect

@r0ck3t23 Just in case anybody still wonders if we are living in a science fiction future... Manufacturing on the moon has been talked about endlessly for decades. The technology is rapidly getting us to a point where doing it isn't only possible, but necessary!

Elon Musk was asked how he’d manufacture satellites at scale. He described building a factory on the moon. And almost nobody caught what he was laying out. Musk: “The lunar soil is like 20% silicon. So you can mine the silicon on the moon, refine it, and create the solar cells and the radiators on the moon.” He’s not talking about going to the moon. He’s talking about turning it into a production line. Mining silicon from lunar soil. Refining it on the surface. Building solar cells from materials already in the ground. Building radiators from aluminum buried in the dust. No supply ships. No trillion-dollar cargo drops. Extract, refine, build. On site. Musk: “You can make the radiators out of aluminum. There’s plenty of silicon and aluminum on the moon.” The physics backs every word. Lunar regolith is loaded with silicon and aluminum oxide. One-sixth gravity means launching finished products into orbit costs a fraction of the energy. No atmosphere means zero drag, zero weather, zero corrosion. For manufacturing, the moon isn’t just viable. It’s superior to Earth. Musk: “The chips you could send from Earth, ‘cause they’re pretty light.” That’s a complete off-world supply chain in twelve words. Heavy components sourced from lunar materials. Lightweight chips shipped from Earth at minimal cost. The full framework for off-planet manufacturing, solved in a single sentence. This isn’t a theorist speculating. This is the man who already lands orbital rockets on ocean barges. Running supply chain math out loud in real time. And nobody is sitting with what comes next. If the moon becomes a manufacturing base, Earth doesn’t stay at the center of anything. Earth becomes a chip supplier. The planet that invented writing, built every empire, launched the Enlightenment. Reduced to a parts vendor for a lunar factory. Every civilization in history was built on the same bet. Control land, resources, and trade routes on this planet. Every war. Every treaty. Every border. All fought over the same thin crust of rock and water. Musk is the first person engineering around that entire system. The most strategic territory in the solar system won’t be on this planet. It’ll be a quarter million miles above it. Whoever controls lunar manufacturing controls orbital infrastructure. Energy systems. Communication networks. Satellite constellations that blanket the planet below. Not through military force. Through supply chain. The nation that builds factories on the moon doesn’t need to win wars down here. They already hold the highest ground that’s ever existed. And right now, one man’s company is the only operation on Earth with the launch infrastructure to make any of this real. Built over twenty years while the rest of the industry called reusable rocketry impossible. He didn’t build a rocket company. He built the only road off this planet that works. We looked at the moon for ten thousand years and saw something sacred. One man looked up and saw a supply chain. The poets had the moon for millennia. The engineers just took it.

Terrific conversation with @ClydeSeepersad of @linuxfoundation about workforce upskilling in the AI era. More in an upcoming research note, but prospects are bright for tech people who are flexible and willing to communicate!

Day 2 at #OSSummit in Minneapolis today, looking forward to some terrific presentations as well as meetings with @linuxfoundation executives about Agentic AI and workforce development!

At the #OSSummit and #EmbeddedLinux this week in Minneapolis. Looking forward to a terrific event!

Proud papa moment, at @blueorigin open house yesterday with Chris, who is working on the New Glenn rocket! BE-4 and 3U engines in the background.

@tbpn @PalmerLuckey "...we suggest going bald or getting jacked over time..." So you are saying I'm already halfway there! <Rubs shiny dome excitedly>

There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen, Steve Jobs, and @PalmerLuckey. You adopt the uniform, you become more iconic and recognizable. It builds your personal brand and lore. But CEOs should be cautious about this strategy. If you're always dressed exactly the same, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral, and if you're aging gracefully, it will look like you said what you said in the clip yesterday. If you must wear the exact same outfit at your public appearances, we suggest going bald or getting jacked over time, like @JeffBezos.

"Please buy something so I know this is working!" Sitting with a founder mentoring client this morning... Her business is growing but not quite fast enough. She is burning out, her staff and investors are restless. We discussed the Tocqueville paradox of rising expectations... People don’t revolt because things are bad. They revolt when things start getting better, expectations rise, and reality stops moving fast enough. So we think the solution is to nudge the curve up, bring more improvement faster. Or to manage expectations better, so people understand that things happen in their time despite all of our efforts to move them faster. And both of those are right. But I think doing them in isolation misses the point. In my mind the most important piece is to shift from a mindset of "please buy something from me so I can prove that my model works" towards "my model works, what do you need, and how can I help?'

@PatrickMoorhead Gilfoyle is the worst nightmare for an Office Space 'Bob' doing staff interviews

So good.

Great event with @seraphim_space and @SpaceFlorida celebrating the next cohort of Florida space companies through the Seraphim accelerator.

DRAM, Flash, BiCMOS, CMOS. @intel has led the way on every major semiconductor innovation over the last 5 decades…and we are not done yet. 🚀 🇺🇸

@AMD 's CEO Dr. @LisaSu is telling the Street that the server CPU market is more than doubling, from a $60 billion forecast to over $120 billion by 2030. She also says that the CPU-to-GPU ratio is collapsing from one-to-eight toward one-to-one because of agentic workloads. That figure sits above the TAM @renehaas237 at @Arm put on stage when I was there at Arm's March launch event. It also underpins the huge results @intel announced a couple of weeks ago. When multiple competing players independently triangulate to the same TAM, that thesis stops being a story and starts being a forecast.