KK

Karan Kunjur

Things Karan Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Karan Kunjur has been a guest on Marketplace (APM) , Marketplace , Marketplace All-in-One and TBPN .

Recently: “Why raise money in euros?” on Marketplace (November 2026); “Why raise money in euros?” on Marketplace (APM) (November 2026); “Why raise money in euros?” on Marketplace All-in-One (November 2026); “Oracle Slides, Disney x OpenAI, SpaceX IPO | Fidji Simo, Dylan Byers, Angela Jiang, Jonathan Slotkin, Aaron Cannon, Karan Kunjur” on TBPN (December 2025).

What They Said

On a tour of the K2 Space satellite factory, the host asked how long until data centers on the ground can be replaced by ones in orbit. The company's CEO gives a flat long-term prediction and a more modest near-term timeline.

Marketplace (APM) · 2026-11-02 Permalink → Listen →
Marketplace (APM) Around 15:54 into the episode
Speaker 4

Yes. We make pretty much the entire solar array fully in-house. So the solar arrays are one of our most vertically integrated components because power is key to what we do, right? Everything comes back to power, so we have to own it down to the lowest level of supply chain.

Kai Ryssdal

…to individual metal components made at their in-house machine shop. Can we get back to data centers in space for a second? How long is it going to be until we don't have to have all those gajillion data centers in like Ohio and Virginia, and you guys just take care of the problem up in space? Yeah,

Speaker 2

it's interesting. I was having a conversation with someone about this last night. Long term, all compute will be in space. And the questions are just like, how long will that take? Is it going to compete with terrestrial data centers one year from now or two years from now? Probably not. Will it be competitive five and 10 years from now? I think so. Do

Kai Ryssdal

you worry at all about the. All right, fine. I'm going to go there. The AI bubble that we seem to be in the middle of?

Speaker 2

Yeah, if you look at like any big macro tech shift from like the dot-com through to like, you know, where we're at today, like there always are cycles, right? Does it feel really hot right now? I think there's like a, there's a lot of companies doing really well, right? There's a lot of capital…

Speaker 4

And I think the other thing to highlight is that we as a business, right, our goal is to be general purpose infrastructure, whether it's compute, whether it's communications, any application in space. You're application agnostic. You don't care.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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