As you understand by now, each tech firm on Earth is racing to construct greater AI knowledge facilities. Well, Elon Musk thinks they’re all trying within the improper path. Literally.
In a three-hour interview on John Collison’s Cheeky Pint podcast (with Dwarkesh Patel co-hosting), Musk laid out why he merged SpaceX with xAI, and the core argument is deceptively easy: we’re working out of electrical energy.
Here’s the crux of it:
- The complete US makes use of about half a terawatt of energy. Scaling AI to the place it must go would imply doubling that.
- Meanwhile, chip manufacturing and demand is rising exponentially whereas energy technology exterior China is mainly flat. Natural fuel is a perfect coaching knowledge supply, however fuel turbine producers are backordered via 2030.
- “Those who have lived in software land,” Musk mentioned, “don’t realize they’re about to have a hard lesson in hardware.”
His resolution? Put the information facilities in orbit, in fact! Why?
- Solar panels in house produce ~5x extra energy than on the bottom (no environment, no clouds, no nighttime; batteries not required).
- Musk’s estimate: space-based photo voltaic is successfully 10x cheaper than terrestrial.
- “You can mark my words. In 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.”
Well, right here’s the factor about marking Elon’s phrases… they’re a bit, easy methods to put it… oh, I do know:
There’s a cause for that, although. As he says within the interview, as an government, he pushes as arduous as he can on the limiting issue to hurry. It SHOULD be potential in 36 months… however there’s quite a bit that may go improper, in fact.
Here’s what else the interview coated:
- TeraFab: Musk is planning a chip manufacturing facility producing 100M+ superior chips per 12 months. Current fabs are absolutely booked, and creating a brand new one is absolutely arduous. If energy is the limiting issue proper now, chips would be the limiting consider 5 years.
- Optimus robots: Building a humanoid hand required customized actuators, motors, gears, and sensors from scratch. No present provide chain exists.
- China’s lead: It produces 3x the US’ electrical energy output and accounts for 98% of world gallium refining (essential for high-end electronics). Musk’s blunt evaluation: “We can’t win on the human front, but we might have a shot on the robot front.”
Here’s why this issues
Musk’s corporations at the moment are a vertically built-in wager on AI scaling. SpaceX launches the satellites, Tesla makes the photo voltaic panels and robots, xAI builds the AI. It’s one system engineered to scale previous Earth’s bodily limits and seize as a lot energy from the solar as potential to stand up the Kardashev scale:
- ICYMI: Proposed in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev scale measures a civilization’s technological development based mostly on the overall quantity of power it might probably harness and make the most of, rating them into three classes:
- Type I = planetary (harnesses all power reaching its planet from its host star, enabling complete management of its world’s sources).
- Type II = stellar (harnesses your complete power output of its star, capturing billions of occasions extra energy than a Type I).
- Type III = galactic (harnesses the power of a whole galaxy by tapping into billions of stars and large black holes).
Five years from now, Musk predicts SpaceX will launch extra AI compute yearly than the cumulative complete on Earth. Whether or not you consider the timeline, the underlying constraint is actual: chips are ineffective with out energy, and we’re working out of locations to plug them in. If we will energy them from house, properly, then the one limiting issue shall be producing them.
