The Geneva-based chipmaker has shipped over 5 billion RF antenna chips to Starlink and now expects its low-Earth-orbit business alone to deliver more than $3bn in cumulative revenue between 2026 and 2028. Orbital data centres are an option for later.

When STMicroelectronics first qualified its chips for the European Space Agency in 1977, the satellite business was a different category of operation. Programmes were government-led, hardware was bespoke, and the small fraction of the semiconductor market that flew to orbit was structured for one-off missions, not commodity supply.

Almost half a century later, the Geneva-based chipmaker is now running what its own road map describes as a phase of unprecedented growth in that business. On Monday, it told investors how unprecedented.

STMicro is targeting more than $3bn in cumulative revenue from its space semiconductor business between 2026 and 2028, according to a Reuters report wired through TradingView from the company’s dedicated investor call. The trajectory the figure implies is unusually steep.

ST’s low-Earth-orbit revenue, the line the company breaks out separately, was around $175m in 2021. By 2025 it had reached roughly $600m. By the end of 2026, on the company’s own forecast, it is expected to be close to $1bn. The $3bn cumulative ask, in that context, looks more like a continuation of momentum than a stretch goal.

Where the revenue actually comes from

The driver, as ST executives have described it, is the structural shift from government-led space programmes to commercial constellation operators. SpaceX’s Starlink dominates the customer concentration.

ST has shipped more than five billion RF antenna chips to Starlink user terminals in roughly a decade, with its executives publicly forecasting that figure could double to roughly 10 billion by 2027 as constellation expansion accelerates. Other commercial operators, including Amazon’s Kuiper and OneWeb, sit behind Starlink in the queue.

The company also flagged contracts on the European side that pay differently but matter strategically. ST is supplying components for inter-satellite laser communication links on future SpaceX platforms, and is working with Thales and Eutelsat on the European Union’s planned Iris² sovereign satellite constellation, a project that has been one of the principal vehicles for European technological-sovereignty policy.

TNW has covered the broader European satellite race in detail, and Iris²’s expected switch-on, currently scheduled towards the end of the decade, makes ST one of the operationally indispensable suppliers in the European programme.

The same engineering capability that wins it Starlink volume also wins it Iris² qualifications.

Beyond the headline customers, ST’s space business spans a wider product portfolio than the public conversation around the company tends to register. Radiation-hardened logic, voltage regulators, mixed-signal ASICs, and rad-hard discrete components for satellite platforms are all part of the existing line.

The economics of those products differ across the customer base, but the underlying engineering, building chips that will function reliably in vacuum, in extreme thermal cycles, and under sustained radiation, is one of the higher-margin specialisations in semiconductor manufacturing.

New Space, in plain English

What changed the maths, in ST’s framing, was the arrival of New Space. Until roughly 2018, the standard radiation-hardened chip for a satellite was a custom part priced for a customer that intended to build a single, $200m geosynchronous bird.

Constellation operators, building hundreds or thousands of identical low-cost satellites, needed something different: rad-hard parts that came in plastic packages, in volume, at prices that did not destroy the unit economics of a 1,200-spacecraft constellation.

ST released its first economical rad-hard line for New Space in 2022, in cost-effective plastic packaging across power, analog, and logic categories. Four years later, that early commitment looks unusually well-timed.

The wider market context fits the trajectory. Independent market sizings of the space semiconductor sector put global revenues somewhere between $5bn and $7bn currently, with mid-single-digit annual growth across most forecasts.

ST’s own LEO revenue trajectory implies it is capturing a disproportionate share of that growth. The $3bn cumulative target, divided across three years, is consistent with the company holding around a quarter of global space-semiconductor revenue at peak.

Orbital data centres, on the optionality list

ST executives also identified orbital data centres as a possible future market, but, importantly, said they had not included any related revenue in the current 2026–2028 target. The hedging is sensible. TNW reported earlier this year on SpaceX’s own pre-IPO disclosures, in which the company warned investors that orbital AI data centres rely on “unproven technologies” and may never achieve commercial viability.

SpaceX’s S-1 framing was startlingly candid for a company that had previously promoted orbital compute as a near-inevitability. The thermal economics, in particular, remain unforgiving: radiating one megawatt of heat at 20°C in orbit requires roughly 1,200 square metres of radiator surface, the area of four tennis courts. The technical premise of the business model is, in 2026, an open question.

ST’s posture, including orbital data centres in the conversation but excluding them from the revenue model, is the right one for an established public company. Investors want to know the optionality exists. They do not, on the current evidence, want it priced. STMicro has chosen to disclose the upside without booking it. That is, on this category of bet, the more credible position.

The Monday announcement comes against a wider backdrop in which Europe has been struggling to articulate a coherent commercial space strategy. TNW has covered Europe’s broader spacetech difficulties consistently, with the dominant story being one of fragmented funding, slow procurement, and dependence on US launch infrastructure.

Inside that frame, ST’s announcement is a counter-data point. A European semiconductor company, headquartered in Geneva and listed in Paris and Milan, is now one of the most consequential commercial suppliers to Elon Musk’s Starlink and to Europe’s own sovereign constellation programme simultaneously.

That is the kind of dual-track win European tech-sovereignty policy has been asking for, and not consistently getting.

It also matters at the level of the company itself. STMicro is in the middle of a difficult guidance reset, having pushed its $20bn+ revenue ambition out from an earlier target to 2030. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $3.10bn, beating consensus, but the broader auto-and-industrial cycle has been less generous than the company once expected.

ST’s separate €5bn Italian EV-chip fab investment, which TNW has tracked, is the company’s bet on the next phase of automotive electrification. The space business, in that context, is one of the rare lines that is unambiguously growing and unambiguously high-margin.

The risks behind the target

The space business is not without exposure. The first risk is customer concentration. With more than five billion chips already shipped to a single Starlink programme and another five billion projected by 2027, ST’s space revenue depends to an unusual degree on SpaceX’s continued constellation expansion, on the durability of Starlink’s commercial economics, and on SpaceX’s willingness to keep a single supplier at this scale of dependence.

TNW has reported on Europe’s small but growing low-Earth-orbit ecosystem, but the alternative customer set, even taken together, does not match Starlink’s chip demand.

The second is qualification timelines. New Space rad-hard products move faster than legacy government programmes, but they still require flight heritage, certification with launch and operator partners, and acceptance into bills of materials that take quarters to update. Slippage anywhere in that chain compresses the achievable run-rate.

The third is geopolitical. STMicro’s European listing and Geneva headquarters insulate it, in part, from the US-China semiconductor export-control regime, but a meaningful share of its supply chain and customer base sits inside that regime.

Any tightening that affects rad-hard or RF antenna components specifically would change the trajectory. The company’s exposure is manageable but not zero.

Where the trajectory points

Three indicators will signal whether the $3bn target lands or slips. The first is Starlink shipment volumes through 2026 and 2027, which ST will disclose at quarterly checkpoints. Yahoo Finance flagged the doubling-of-Starlink-deliveries detail when ST first signalled the trajectory, and the slope of the line will be visible quarter by quarter. The second is the cadence of Iris² procurement: when contracts firm up and shipments begin, the European side of ST’s space business moves from optionality to revenue.

The third is whether the orbital-data-centre market, on which ST is publicly noncommittal, develops a customer base that justifies retroactively pulling it into the revenue model. By the company’s own framing, three years is the soonest meaningful orbital-compute deployment becomes a real conversation.

What was confirmed on Monday is that one of Europe’s largest semiconductor companies has decided that LEO is no longer a hobby line. Seeking Alpha framed the targets as a commitment to the 2028 milestone, and the company’s road map has, on the available evidence, the engineering and customer relationships to support that commitment.

The wider question, whether a satellite-constellation boom can support multiple chip suppliers at this scale or whether Starlink’s near-monopoly customer position makes ST’s lead difficult for any rival to displace, is the one investors will be asking through the rest of the year.

For now, the figures speak. From $175m in 2021 to nearly $1bn in 2026, with a $3bn cumulative target through 2028, and an investor call hosted to detail the strategy. A 49-year-old space-chip business, in other words, is suddenly one of the most interesting growth lines in European semiconductors.