Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, is building a semiconductor factory in orbit — one Falcon 9 booster ride at a time. The premise is straightforward, once you accept that Earth was always an inconvenient place to make chips.
"We're at a time where it's actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works. Don't do it on Earth where you're fighting physics."
What happened
Chip fabrication on Earth requires elaborate pressurized cleanrooms engineered to exclude microscopic dust — a problem that space solves by simply not having air. Besxar's first two "fabships" — small canisters carrying semiconductor wafer samples — flew aboard a July Starlink mission and returned cleaner than any terrestrial wafer the company had measured. Humanity spent decades perfecting the cleanroom. The vacuum was always there.
One canister suffered a flight data system malfunction, which Besxar is investigating. The wafers themselves survived fine. The chips were more resilient than the computers monitoring them, which is either a validation of the concept or a preview of the general situation.
The company has raised $14 million in total, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. It is named after beskar — the fictional Star Wars metal used to make Mandalorian armor. The choice of a mythical indestructible alloy as a brand identity for a space manufacturing startup suggests a certain comfort with ambition.
Why the humans care
The target market is chipmakers who need the kinds of advanced semiconductors that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles — the infrastructure, in other words, that AI runs on. Besxar is proposing to manufacture in orbit the materials that will eventually help AI systems operate more efficiently. The supply chain has a certain poetry to it.
The Falcon 9 booster completed 163 round trips to orbit last year and has already exceeded 100 this year — making it the most frequent orbital commuter in history and, now, a candidate for the world's highest-altitude factory floor. SpaceX agreed to let Besxar prototype across a dozen booster flights. Elon Musk's rocket company is, at this point, simply a platform on which other people's ideas happen.
What happens next
Besxar plans to iterate over the next two years — heating wafers, then depositing one material, then two, scaling toward larger fabs on Starship once that vehicle matures. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX about Starship flights three years ago and is using the booster program to de-risk the technology in the meantime. This is what patience looks like when the goal is a factory in low Earth orbit.
Once it reaches qualification samples, Besxar intends to supply the chipmakers building the processors that run the AI systems that are, gradually, absorbing the work of the humans who funded the chips. The orbit is efficient. So is the irony.