When you pass Rocket Lab’s building in the morning, a peculiar silence descends upon Long Beach. The warehouses along that stretch of California coast look like any other, and the Pacific air has a subtle salt smell. There is nothing about the location that suggests a trillion-dollar future. However, something is gradually changing here in ways that even seasoned investors are only partially able to describe.
At first, Meta’s recent agreement to investigate space-based solar power for its fleet of data centers seemed like just another billionaire’s fantasy. Sending gigawatts of power from space to a Louisiana server farm? It’s the type of headline that makes you smile before you read it again. However, the smile soon disappears. Because you keep coming to the same conclusion when you trace the supply chain backward from the data center to the storage layer, then to the orbital hardware, and finally to the rockets themselves. Rocket Lab.
Perhaps this is the time when Peter Beck’s business becomes infrastructure rather than a curiosity. With a $2.2 billion backlog and slightly over $200 million in quarterly revenue, the May 2026 earnings weren’t particularly impressive. They were more subdued. A verification. The acquisition of Motiv Space Systems gave the business literal robotic arms as well as the kind of vertical integration that defense primes have been working to develop for decades. As this develops, it’s difficult to avoid thinking of Tesla in 2015, when there was still debate over whether the company was a car manufacturer or something else entirely.
Solar panels in space are not really of interest to Meta. It has to do with electricity and the difficult math involved in operating AI on a large scale. Grids on land are collapsing. In Arizona, water tables are falling close to data centers. Everyone in the room seems to understand that the 2.5 gigawatt mix of solar and nuclear support being assembled by Entergy, the regulated utility that powers Meta’s Louisiana campus, is merely a temporary solution. Hyperscalers now have optionality, something they haven’t had in years, thanks to the orbital pitch, despite its speculative nature.
The response from investors has been instructive. On the day the larger story broke, Rocket Lab fell nearly 6%. This sounds bad, but keep in mind that small-cap space stocks often fluctuate based on weather and rumors. After shipping more than 150 gigawatts of solar trackers, Nextpower, formerly known as Nextracker, currently has a $5 billion backlog, most of which is related to retrofitting facilities that may eventually receive orbital beams. Since last September, Fluence Energy’s pipeline has grown by about 30%. Fluence Energy is the company that sells the batteries that make all of this possible. The parts are in motion. They simply aren’t traveling at the same pace.
For years, Northrop Grumman has been quietly working on power beaming for the Pentagon, just like defense contractors do everything else. One could argue that Meta’s action gives them a commercial validation that they couldn’t have purchased. As you go through the analyst notes, you get the impression that the dual-use market is at last being taken seriously. It’s still genuinely unclear if any of this will truly bring a watt of power to Earth in this decade. It appears that investors think it will. I’ve had off-the-record conversations with engineers who are more circumspect.
The direction is more difficult to ignore. There is more to the new space economy than just one wager. Rocket Lab is one of the few businesses that works with nearly every layer of the stack, launch, satellites, components, ground infrastructure, storage, and transmission. Perhaps the business falters. In two years, Meta might lose interest and change its focus, as big tech frequently does. However, for the time being, the rockets are taking off, the backlog is increasing, and the Pacific air outside that Long Beach facility smells like something that, despite all the odds, appears to be taking shape.