After AI, This Could Be the Trade of the Decade

Beyond AI, this might be the most underpriced investment theme in public markets. Spectrum, satellites, and a field map of who actually owns the sky.

In late December 2025, a single Chinese institute you’ve probably never heard of (the Radio Spectrum Development and Technology Innovation Research Institute) filed paperwork at the ITU for 203,000 satellites across 14 new constellations, with the bulk of it (193,428 satellites split between two systems called CTC-1 and CTC-2) sitting under that one institute alone. The whole thing was submitted in the final week of the year.

Two hundred thousand satellites. One country. One week.

For context: the entire global active satellite fleet today sits at around 15,000 birds (with Starlink alone accounting for roughly 10,000 of them), and the US controls the overwhelming majority of LEO. China just filed for a single-month number that, on paper, would let it own the sky.

Everyone in our world is talking about AI right now, and they should be. AI is the trade of the decade. But sitting right underneath the AI conversation, almost invisible to most public-market investors, there’s a second story building that I think will end up as one of the biggest investment themes of this cycle.

That story is satellites. More precisely, it’s the spectrum and the orbital slots they sit on. They are finite. They are allocated by a UN body almost nobody reads about. And they are increasingly treated, inside every major government, as strategic national assets.

This piece is my attempt to lay out the whole landscape. How the system actually works, who’s fighting whom, which public companies have real exposure, and where I think the money eventually flows.