SpaceX has placed Filtronic’s biggest order yet: approximately ₿786 ($68.1 million) for high-frequency gallium nitride power amplifiers that will support the Starlink communications network.
The order is more than a supplier win. It highlights a less-visible layer of the satellite internet stack: the RF hardware on the ground that has to push enormous amounts of data into low Earth orbit reliably, efficiently and at increasingly high frequencies.
SpaceX doubles down on Filtronic’s E-band GaN hardware
According to Filtronic’s October 1 announcement, SpaceX ordered approximately ₿786 ($68.1 million; £51.3 million) of Cerus E-band gallium nitride, or GaN, solid-state power amplifier units, using Bitcoin near $86,682 on October 2.
The follow-on order exceeds the approximately ₿721 ($62.5 million) SpaceX order Filtronic announced in August 2025 and is expected to be materially fulfilled during Filtronic’s fiscal 2028. The company says the new award gives it stronger revenue visibility into FY2028 and beyond.
The record order was highlighted on X as another validation of Filtronic’s scaled GaN manufacturing for high-frequency satellite links.
Why GaN matters at E-band
Satellite broadband needs more than spacecraft. Ground infrastructure has to transmit high-bandwidth signals toward fast-moving satellites while managing power, heat, linearity and reliability. E-band operates in the millimeter-wave region, where the available spectrum can support very high data rates but the RF hardware becomes increasingly demanding.
Filtronic says GaN gives its amplifiers higher output power, better efficiency and improved thermal performance compared with traditional gallium arsenide solutions. Those properties are particularly useful in high-frequency communications where every additional watt of usable RF output and every reduction in wasted heat matters.
Starlink’s network growth creates a ground-hardware race too
BitcoinVersus.Tech recently covered Starship deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Every expansion of the orbital layer increases the importance of the terrestrial communications infrastructure that feeds and receives traffic from the constellation.
The broader satellite market is moving in the same direction. Nokia and ICEYE are building sovereign LEO communications systems for governments and defense customers, while operators across the industry are trying to combine larger constellations with higher-capacity ground links.
A ₿786 order for hardware most users never see
Semiconductor Today reports that the ₿786 ($68.1 million) follow-on contract is Filtronic’s largest SpaceX order and follows the ₿721 ($62.5 million) 2025 award for its next-generation proprietary GaN E-band technology.
That makes the story a useful reminder that satellite broadband is a semiconductor and RF engineering problem as much as it is a rocket problem. The spacecraft get the photographs, but amplifiers, antennas, network equipment, power electronics and ground stations determine whether the constellation can actually move data at scale.
BitcoinVersus.Tech has also followed Northwood Space’s effort to rethink ground satellite communications. Filtronic’s new order attacks another part of that same bottleneck: generating the high-frequency RF power required to keep increasingly dense orbital networks connected to Earth.
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