Views: Why SpaceX is the most important property story of the year

Rachel Wood, managing director of Sladen Estates, joint developer of Bicester Arc, speaks on SpaceX’s strategies and how they could translate to Oxfordshire:

Fresh from the largest stock-market debut in history, SpaceX would rather run its data centres in orbit than wait for a power connection. That instinct – power before place – is quietly reshaping where ambitious businesses in Britain can grow, and the property industry that grasps it first will win the investment.

When SpaceX floated at around $1.75 trillion – the largest stock-market debut in history – the coverage fixed on the valuation, the hype and the man behind it. Far less noticed was a detail buried in its pitch for the next phase of AI: a plan, now filed with US regulators, to put data centres in orbit. Not for the spectacle, and not for the science-fiction headlines. For the electricity. In space, the sun is always shining, there’s no land to buy and no grid queue to join. Strip away the rockets and one of the most ambitious companies on earth has concluded it would rather leave the planet than wait for a power connection. That tells you something.

It’s an extreme answer to a question that is becoming impossible to ignore down here on the ground: where do you find enough reliable energy to do the thing you actually want to do? Because that question doesn’t stay in orbit. The same constraint that has SpaceX designing satellites the size of a Boeing 747 is quietly deciding where ambitious businesses in this country can and can’t grow.

The new first question

For years, business space was judged on a familiar list. Rent. Square footage. Proximity to good talent. Infrastructure connections. All of that still matters. But for the companies doing the most interesting work right now – sciences, advanced engineering, quantum, AI – a different question now comes first.

Before they ask what a building costs, they ask whether it can power what they do. Laboratories, computing, prototyping lines, electrified manufacturing: all of it runs on serious, dependable electricity, and a great deal of it. To put the scale in perspective, a single AI-focused data centre can draw as much power as 100,000 homes – and the largest now being built will use twenty times that.

The bottleneck

This is a genuinely interesting shift, and it is changing what makes a location valuable. Land, transport links and talent led to the business parks we already have. Power is what will build the next ones. The current strain is real: the queue to connect to Britain’s grid has swollen past 700 gigawatts – several times the capacity the country will actually need by 2030, clogged with speculative projects – and Ofgem is now reviewing the whole connections system, partly because demand from power-hungry users such as data centres is climbing so fast.

With connection waits in major markets now routinely measured in years rather than months, a business can have the funding, the team and the ambition all lined up and still be stuck for the best part of a decade because the site it has chosen simply cannot get the energy in time. When that happens, the conversation tends to end there.

Redefining good property

This changes what “good property” actually means. A flexible lease and a smart fit-out count for very little if the power is not there to match. Energy has moved from a line on the facilities budget to a strategic question that shapes how fast a company can grow and increasingly, where it chooses to grow at all. For a region competing for investment, that is no longer a niche technical issue. It is one of the things that decides whether the next generation of ambitious businesses set up here or somewhere else entirely.

The encouraging part is that the sharper end of the property world saw this coming. The schemes worth watching are the ones treating power not as something to negotiate once a tenant signs, but as foundational infrastructure – in the ground first, before anyone commits. It’s the same instinct that has always made a site more valuable for being near a motorway junction or a mainline station. Power is simply the new version of that test.

Power before tenant

That was our thinking at Bicester Arc. Rather than leave occupiers to join the back of the grid queue, we installed a dedicated on-site substation delivering 13.7 MVA solely for the businesses on the park – power that is live and ready now, not subject to a multi-year wait.

Paired with space that flexes from 10,000 to 600,000 sq ft, a 15-acre Eco Park and a location just off the M40 within one of the UK’s fastest-growing economic regions – inside the cluster of advanced engineering and motorsport talent around Oxford – it means a business can commit to a site knowing the hardest part of its growth plan is already solved.

A race for power

The wider direction of travel is unmistakable. To see how far the centre of gravity has shifted, consider this: the five biggest technology companies now spend more building AI infrastructure than the entire world spends producing oil and gas. The race everyone is watching – the one that runs from trading floors all the way up into orbit – is, underneath it all, a race for power.

The places that attract the next decade of growth will be the ones that understand what a rocket company and a laboratory in Oxfordshire turn out to have in common: in the end, everything you want to build comes back to energy. Sorting that out, close to the ground, may be one of the most useful things our industry can do for the economy right now. SpaceX is willing to go to space to solve it. The rest of us just need to sort it out before the tenant arrives.