U.S. media reports say SpaceX, the industry’s leader, will file for an IPO in March and could go public as early as June, with a potential valuation of up to $1.75 trillion.

This could become the largest IPO in history—and it is almost certain to trigger a new boom in the space sector.

“2026 could very well be the first year of the commercial space era,” Poseidon Ho (侯海琦), founding partner and CEO of Outliers Fund (異數創投), told me.

The firm is the only venture capital fund in Taiwan dedicated exclusively to investing in the space industry.

He noted that SpaceX has dramatically lowered launch costs, effectively building the infrastructure of the space age—much like President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, which connected the eastern and western United States with a vast network of highways.

“Out of that came FedEx, Walmart, McDonald’s—an entire wave of industries no one had anticipated.”

The commercial space era, he believes, will spark a similar wave of cross-sector innovation. Outliers has identified 53 distinct sub-sectors, including lunar mining and space-based pharmaceuticals.

One of the hottest emerging areas is space-based data centers.

Elon Musk has acknowledged that the purpose of taking SpaceX public is to raise capital. The company plans to use massive Starship rockets to send hundreds of gigawatts of AI servers into Earth orbit each year. Powered by solar energy, these data centers would then transmit their computing results back to Earth via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.

If SpaceX overcomes the technical challenges involved, a significant portion of the servers manufactured by Taiwan’s major electronics firms could one day be launched into orbit, circling the earth.

That would formally make Taiwan part of the space industry.

A Legendary Taiwanese VC Investing in Commercial Space

Outliers Fund, which operates teams in both Taiwan and California, is—true to its name—an outlier in Taiwan’s venture capital ecosystem.

Hsiou-wei Lin (林修葳), a senior advisor to the fund and a professor at National Taiwan University’s Department of International Business, said the key lies with Ho himself. “He is an outlier.”

………..

(To read the exclusive story in full, visit the Tech Taiwan Substack)

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