Axiom Space CEO Tejpaul Bhatia: orbital data centers, space pharma, and the commercialization of the ISS era

the near term? Uh is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS? Um and what what else are you excited about?

Even even in there it's like does do are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product you know advance to some degree or also like sort of verticalized yeah are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury? Yeah, there certainly is.

Uh for ALS it is a neurodeenerative condition. So their conditions just gets worse as the time progresses. So um you know that that makes it very difficult. You know one of our participants is in what's called a late stage ALS which means that he's effectively locked in.

So unable to move, unable to speak even and is connected to a a mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive you know in a similar ways that basically uh Stephven Hawking uh was able to sort of live the last 50 plus years of his lives.

And um you know for them they also have more fatigue and they have different needs um as as you can imagine from someone like Nolan who can who's still very vibrant who still can speak who can who can still you know kind of engage with the world in a different ways and their application their needs will change as a result of it.

Um but really you know what what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain.

So, you know, for someone who is um quadriplegic, which means they're sort of paralyzed from neck down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to ALS, whether it's due to brain stem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state, we're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they uh will find more uh useful for that partic particular situation.

similar to how, you know, when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that and and that's something that's been uh kind of wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants. Well, this has been fantastic.

We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for? neurolink. com/careers. And I would definitely encourage people to check out this uh latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in the past.

It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page and then people go there work for an average about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career because if you're going to have an impact like expect to stay, you know, at least stay for a few decades. It's not it's not a jobs page.

It's a career page because you're going to be here for 40 years substantially. Yeah. Excited to follow along. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for the update. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for having me. Cheers. Uh I I'm I'm This is incredible, inspiring.

I was tearing up thinking about giving someone the gift of Call of Duty as well.

Um but uh you know there's an interesting story about imagine hearing that life-changing um unironically um Stephen Hawking they uh the the the voice models to generate voice actually improved during his lifetime but he had created a brand around his particular voice generation model and so he elected not to update to a new more natural sounding voice.

Yeah. Powerful branding. Powerful branding. Right. It's like one of the most unique voices in human history, you could pick it out out of immediately. Immediately. I So, I love that anecdote.

But then also uh for for people that are now just going to get the ability to speak through something like Neurolink, they're going to have the best voice models possible that are indistinguishable from human voices. So, yeah, I was thinking about it.

You can imagine 10 years from now, somebody on X, can anybody get me a Neuralink API key? But been thinking about it, too. It it it really feels like a market that could very well uh you know end up as a as a true monopoly.

You can see DJ eventually having to show up in Congress as as one does if you're successful enough. Um, and but but you know, think about it.

If if you're, you know, a patient for a specific issue or you uh are just a regular consumer that wants some type of app in the Neurolink ecosystem, you're not going to be like, "Oh yeah, I'd like brain surgery multiple times. " You know, you're not going to want to work with like a bunch of different BCI companies.

You're going to want to work with one and then be able to imagine being able to just play Call of Duty on your Neurolink and then log into the Adio Neuralink app and get some customer relationship magic directly piped into your brain.

Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You could be the Neurolink enabled SDR given the best SDRs a run for their money. That's right. Well, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We really appreciate you joining. Thanks so much.

What's going on? Hey guys, how are you? We're great. Um, thanks so much for joining. Would you mind uh setting the table for us and kicking us off with the the latest and greatest? What's going on in your world? Sure. So, hey everyone, my name is Tez. Uh, I am the CEO of Axiom Space.

Uh, today's actually day 60 of my job as CEO. Uh, just jump back a few years, uh, I invested in Axiom uh, in their series A. I was working at Google at the time. I'm a multi-time founder myself and actually swore I would never go back to startups. He's an addict. He can't stop. Exactly.

Uh there's something wrong with us in in the best possible way. But uh you know uh once a founder always a founder and I I think of myself as a founder mode uh CEO at the company. Uh the company was founded by uh Dr. Cam Gferian uh space legend. He has multiple unicorns uh in the space sector.

I invested because Axiom Space won the exclusive contract to attach its modules, its commercial infrastructure, its station to the International Space Station, uh, which is coming down. It was designed from day one to have a certain shelf life.

And the way I saw it is this small startup had the ultimate beach head, literally an exclusive contract for the most expensive product ever built by humanity.

$150 billion spent to put that thing up, that giant thing, and then five billion a year by 15 countries with all this incredible science that's just ready to be commercialized. And I was like, "All right, this is this is where I'm going to go all in. " Also, I um I'm from the I'll say the dot bust era.

I got to taste the boom a little bit, but I really got to viscerally feel and swallow the the bust. And I I see I see a repetition in time. I see like 1995 all over again.

And imagine if in '95 you knew cloud computing was coming, you knew mobile was coming, you knew AI was coming, how you would invest, and how you double down. And and that's that's really what I'm doing with my money and my time. That's interesting. I really like that analogy. Uh let's let's stretch it as far as we can.

Uh you could kind of get like DARPA as the ISS. What are going to be the breakout applications? We've talked to a lot of different uh founders. uh communications, ISR, put a camera in space, put a Wi-Fi router in space. Basically, those are the obvious ones. What else is interesting?

What do you think the breakout applications in space broadly will be from tourism to asteroid mining? You name it, you're you're the expert here. So, yeah. So, um let me just answer that upfront, then I'm going to bring it back 30 years to 95 and just and bring it back.

Uh but first, quickly before I do that, I was smiling when I uh I joined for two reasons. One is I had two interviews today. I had CNBC and I had TBPN and my comm's team puts a briefing together and has dress code and CNBC was wear your uh Axiom t-shirt. Okay. And your podcast was wear a button down uh that's hilarious.

Thanks for telling who's the legacy media now. Yeah, we are the legacy media. Reminding also like two things. One is in my startup days, we um this was like 2007 to 2017. We called it the uniform. Like when you like the most you'd ever dress up is a collared shirt, a blazer.

I didn't even own a suit, so I couldn't say a suit jacket and jeans, right? And you knew you were fine. If you had to if you were if you were asking for money or you were trying to recruit someone or closing a deal or hanging out with someone in t-shirt and flip-flops, you're okay. So quasi put on my uniform today.

So it looks fantastic. So thank you. It it is not a requirement by any means. Just a great sign of respect. It is a great sign of respect. Yeah. No. And um the other thing the reason I was smiling is you're talking about uh Stephen Hawkings voice. Yeah.

And like as you were talking and and I I knew the Neurolink guy was on before, but I I wasn't listening. I was in the in the waiting room. But as soon as you said it, like we can all like hear it. We know it right.

In terms of branding and you were saying how like you people will be downloading voices and you could use that as a thing. It kind of reminds me of how people still have like the terminal font on their computers. Oh yeah. Or like or like the green matrix font because it makes it look like it's like pretty cool.

So like that might be a another application. But sorry getting getting back to your question. I'll answer directly what I think the big breakout markets I think each of these will be their own trillion dollar market in the next couple of years. Uh first is um orbital data centers. So data in space.

Uh I I'll tell you personally for Axiom, you know, our modules which are life support vehicles are cloud first. They have to be. You can't support life without native cloud computing. I'm not talking for streaming or gaming or communications literally for all the systems that it takes to keep you know humans alive.

So if you think of that infrastructure and like I said I will jump back 30 years to 1995 but that infrastructure can be fractionalized and it can be shared and cost can go down to zero and below zero where you're giving startups credits to use that infrastructure so they can build their apps.

So I do think orbital data centers and I think it's as simple as data centers 400 km up versus somewhere on the ground and it there's other challenges um but interestingly the same limitations power right what we have here that's the first one second I think is pharmaceuticals uh drugs that are tested in microgravity uh that will change humanity forever uh that have just been science experiments to date uh we have seen the first drugs that were tested on the Axiom 3 and Axium 4 missions uh that have gone to human testing, clinical testing, FDA approved testing on on the earth.

So you're seeing decades of research now becoming a reality, becoming commercialized and sorry on the data centers. We've been we've been running workloads uh with Amazon since our first mission AX1 in 2022.

We sent up an AWS computer and we've been running workloads from the ground basically making money off bits versus atoms and and we'll talk about the business model the space the the space business model is all about atoms it's about up mass it's about kilograms it needs to change so we're proving that and the third is advanced materials uh whether that is manufacturing of those materials up there or um if we're talking about semiconductors maybe even doing some testing in a pure environment and when I say pure I just mean no gravity affecting it and maybe doing the uh the development down here.

But I think those three will be breakout hits and I think I I'll be as bold as say this decade. Yeah, people were talking about ZBLAN in space ultra pure crystals grown for super high throughput data transfer. So yeah, lots of interesting stuff there. Uh I do have a follow-up on the uh on the data center in space thing.

Uh we've heard from some folks who are just really in the weeds on data center scaling for these large AI training runs that there's still just messiness where sometimes you got to unplug it, plug it back in.

Sometimes you got to receat a chip and uh you know just dust it off or something like it's just a it's just a messy thing. And so putting it in a truly stranded environment where there's no humans it that there might be new questions.

So, I'm wondering is the narrative like you solve that with like a humanoid robot or maybe a human on a space station in space or maybe you go to Nvidia and you say, "Hey, you need to make a ruggedized version of the H200 that will just never fail and is more so are there any other developments that you think need to happen aside from obviously like launch costs need to continue to go down, like we need to continue to send up mass to orbit, whatnot, but on the actual data center side, is Is there anything that you think is uh you know another key milestone that will unlock that opportunity?

Yeah, so it's all the above and a little more. Um but then I'll I'll I'll I'll touch the launch cost piece and like I said I'll go back 30 years and by going back 30 years we're going to pull the space industry forward 30 years. That's how big an opportunity this is. So on the data centers, yeah, it's messy.

So the first part is it requires humans and Axiom's entire business and product line is based on more humans going to space. We've sent 16 in the last 3 years. Um I'm extremely proud of our team. I'm extremely proud of myself. Uh in that story of me joining Axiom.

I invested then I started advising the founders and then I leaned in and I said there's a big opportunity here for our for the demand side locking into market demand.

And I spent the last three years of my life, last four years of my life, um, traveling the world, meeting with world leaders, uh, prime minister, uh, president, uh, ministries of defense, e, economics, education, and the demand is very real, right?

So, if a startup of a few years old, a guy who had never done anything in space, although I'd been dreaming about it since I was three, uh, is able to architect these massive deals. And just just to be clear, I will always refer to us as a startup because we we're 100% a startup in every sense of the word.

Um our deals are anywhere from like 50 to 150 million, right? We're going to do north of 400 million. Yeah. Big dollar, right? Thank you. Um you know, and it's funny at Google, I I had a couple of business lines. I had a couple contracts over a billion dollars of ARR.

I had a business unit that brought in half a billion dollars in a year. What you know what happens at uh Google if you don't bring in a billion? They shut you down. Life or death. Yeah. You know, for any single deal that I've done was larger than the enterprise value of any of my startups, right?

So, each of these are massive startups. So, um we're 100% based our product lines are all about what we think is going to be this inflection point for the number of astronauts going up. And I'll give you some numbers on that as well. Uh but this is we're building product lines for where astronauts live.

the Axiom station first connected to ISS. Um how they explore Axiom is a sole provider of space suits. Uh the next humans step on the moon will be wearing an Axiom space suit. Like it's kind of insane that that's I can't even say that.

So and then we're building the labs like this the data centers, pharmaceuticals, advanced materials. This isn't theory, right? We've done it on the X4 mission right now. Um we have done a deal with uh Aura and the Aura ring will Yeah, it's awesome. So cool. Uh I just got this RS 60 60 days ago and I love it.

But uh I um it's going to be a wearable checking the health metrics of an astronaut and then this is the craziest part feeding that to our cloud computer up in space. So remember I told you we sent up an Amazon AWS computer on AX1. We've sent an Alexa up. We've done some edge computing.

So I'll touch your touch on your point about ruggedizing the materials. But for us it all starts with humans. So yeah, whether that's a human taking out uh a hard drive or a rack that got messed up with radiation, which happens all the time, uh it's going to require humans.

I think the next step is robots, humanoids, um ruggedized material for both cases. The one piece I think you might be missing is just disposable, right?

You know, there's um there's something to be said about aging technology that if it's safely uh retired and burnt up and doesn't cause environmental problems, it's actually cheaper and more effective just to send up the next generation technology.

H100's mel like if 200 years ago you told somebody, I'm going to I'm going to order something from across the world thousands of miles away. It's going to arrive here. I'm going to use it for a few, you know, days and then I'm going to throw it away.

You know, like some disposable like a uniform or like a shirt for an event or whatever. It's like we'll get to that point with space where we can send send things up that don't need to last for months or years or decades. And yeah, it is Axiom's orbital orbital data center network, we call it a um heterogeneous network.

So think of like um a satellite constellation. They're all exactly the same. You send them up, they have the same uh functionality. Each version of it gets stronger, more powerful. Each of our nodes is different, right?

Our first two nodes are going up um next quarter, and they're normal satellite orbital data centers with optical uh coms and compute. Our module is a data center with the specialty of maintaining human life.

Our lab will be a data center with a specialty of doing um robotic testing or human testing on experiments and our manufacturing platform will be a data center with the capabilities of doing 3D printing. What ties them all together is the data. So if one of them were to go down, you don't lose the data.

That's the whole point of a network and zones and and nodes. Uh but if your old data center like yeah you could replace and upgrade it but at that point the cost versus the actual value you get for sending a new one up again if you had a safe way to dispose it. It actually makes more sense for it to be disposable. Mhm.

Uh what story do you think we should be telling ourselves or what story should be written in the history books about the ISS? I remember I saw this movie, which I know Jordy hasn't seen because he hasn't seen any movies. Uh, Valyrian and the City of Thousand Planets, and it has this really cool opening montage.

It's by the director who did The Fifth Element. And basically, it starts with the ISS, and they just keep adding modules to it until it gets so big that they push it off into deep space. And then aliens come and add on modules, and it turns into this like massive cluster. And it's like crazy sci-fi movie.

But I thought that idea of just like layering on the ISS, this happens in Seven Eves as well, the Neil Stevenson uh book. And I I was and and and when when I tell the story to myself, I was super inspired as a kid by the idea of the ISS.

It was amazing that it got built, but it feels like we're just kind of like, okay, jobs finished, and we're not really going bigger and bigger in terms of like human space stations. So, how should we think about the ISS when we look back on it? Is it just like like the moon landing?

It was like a science project that we did. It was cool, inspiring, but it didn't really grow into anything. Are private companies going to take up the mantle? Where does all this go? Yeah.

So, you know, I think the legacy of the ISS and the value it's created for humanity on the scientific, the engineering, the diplomatic level is all incredible, right? Uh and and we should always remember that there's a lot of [ __ ] that's going on down here that up there it's still peace, right?

And it's when they look down and when they work together, they're one team and we're one team down here, right? Regardless of what we hear. And it's inspiring. Like the AX4 mission right now, four countries, US, India, Poland, and Hungary. India, Poland, and Hungary. They're sending their first ever citizen to the ISS.

Wow. I saw them cross the hatch. I'm going to get emotional even talking about it. seeing these guys smile uh and then address their nations in their own language. First time those words were spoken up in space like magic. Three billion girls and boys saw that yesterday when my parents took me to Kennedy Space Center.

I was 3 years old. My dad um is an was an electric engineer. I was like, "What the hell's going on in that big building? " And he's like, "They build spaceships there. " And I it was a defining moment in my life. Like it was I was a three-year-old cranky kid. And in that moment, my mind, my heart, my soul just erupted.

And like it was like the universe telling me that this is alignment. And that set me on a path for entrepreneurship, engineering, exploration. Three billion kids just got that, you know, like three billion people. Powerful. Um, but yeah, it's it's it's it's a big deal. So we have to remember that. Sorry. Go ahead.

No, go finish and then and then then I'll ask a question. Yeah.

So the um the that inspiration that hope that proving that we are one species that's ultimately what we will remember the station for what I want to remember was to remember and when I say I this is probably more in the the startup books or blogs or whatever it'll be in the future um is the ISS is what allowed space to be free and what I mean by this I mean access to everyone so Axiom space started eight years ago we've sent four missions 16 astronauts, 12 nations, nations that had never been to space before, the first ever Saudi female to go.

Um, we were the first ever to send an all European mission, the first Turkish astronaut after that horrible earthquake they had. Uh, as I mentioned, India, Poland, Hungary. So free in the sense that we freed it. Everyone can go. But more importantly, we brought the cost to free or below free.

Now what I mean by this is as long as we keep the narrative of cost per kilogram is going down. We're basing an entire economy on cost. Our friends who are watching this, none of us think like that. We base it on value, right? We think of cost of acquisition, lifetime value of a customer.

How are you increasing enterprise value? So again, going back to the the the '9s and early 2000s, my first startup was built uh on uh AWS activate. We were one of the first customers.

Uh, and I probably, if it was a year older, a year or two older would have spent three million bucks on a server closet, you know, to get it all set up.

But now, if you're a startup looking to build your app, Amazon, Google, Microsoft will pay you a h 100,000 bucks in credits to build your app on their platform in the hopes that you're the next Spotify or uh Uber or Netflix and then they grow as you grow. Yeah. Cloud is not free.

They were spending billions and billions of dollars on infrastructure, orders of magnitude higher than the space station, just to get Google search going, just to get the Amazon uh store going, just to get the app store going. And then they realize you fractionalize it and you make this accessible for everyone.

So I think the big thing in this transition from the ISS to commercial is we just don't reduce the bar, we remove the bar completely and enable multiple entrepreneurs to knock it out of the park. Um, super exciting. Last question. How do you uh do you see yourselves as like a space prime? Right.

Like it feels like you're very multi-product. The the comp for me down on on Earth would be the traditional kind of defense primes that develop kind of a broad capability set and then you know pursue it from is that is that the right framing? It's it's not a bad framing you know prime or integrator.

Um, some have called us a global space agency. Like I I'm a tech cloud uh venture guy. I like to think of it as a platform. Platform's too ambiguous in my opinion.

You could think of us as but platform in the Micros in the Bill Gates definition where the value that's created on top of your company will be greater than the value that you capture. Right. That's exactly right.

The the second word I was just about to say is and this is this the first time I'm saying it in a public setting. Think of it as an operating system. Yeah. Right. what Microsoft did. Like so if this is the op space operating system for countries, corporations, civilization. Yeah.

This is why I think now is exactly the time to invest because if you believe in space, it's not a question of why should we go, we shouldn't go. It's okay, when are we going? So this is what all investing is. You're betting on timing.

And I feel so strong that 2030 is that Microsoft uh uh Windows moment or the iPhone moment or the chat GPT moment for space. And if you know it's five years from now, like this is where you go all in. Wait, one last question. Uh we've asked a lot of space people this. What's your P moon?

The AI folks have the probability of doom. We have the probability that you will you personally will visit the moon before 2050. Over under 50%, 10% 90% 2050 probability that you have set foot on the moon over over 50%. If if you were to say the probability that I would be in go to space, I'd say 100%. Yeah.

Probability that uh uh we all uh will be able to go uh to lower Earth orbit particularly when like something like Starship comes online. Yeah. Like absolutely. I'll give you a quick stat.

If you look at since Axiom's been around eight years, the first four years before our AX1 mission, we sent about we collectively, humanity, sent about 12 astronauts uh per year. That number has quadrupled in the last four years. And remember, the Dragon only takes four people up. Yeah.

And 16 of those are because of Axiom. What happens when you're sending 70 to 100 people up? Where are they going to go? We've already proven that demand far outstrips supply at the at the government level, at the corporate level, and we're building that infrastructure to catch up. This is this is that tipping point.

So the moon 2050, what are we talking about? 25 years from now, I will be 73 72. Mhm. Yeah. I think it's it's over 50. Amazing. I love it. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for We can't wait to uh we'll have to do a show someday in person.

I mean, I'd have you back and just do a whole deep dive on the lunar economy and how you see that plan out and just even even beyond and space exploration. I'm sure we could go a bunch of different ways that are less for you guys. Are you wearing full suits or are you guys wearing jeans? Full suits. Full suits.

I I did the I did the Oh, you did the You did the casual pants. There you go. It works. It works. And and and white suits because the market is at alltime highs and we're celebrating. That's right. Is a blue Mine's a blue suit cuz the only suit I own. Okay. Simple, man. Simple, man. Well, great talking to you. Awesome.

Well, thanks for coming on. Congrats on on all the the progress.