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Every year someone names a new bottleneck for AI compute scaling. Dylan Patel on why power isn't gonna be the big one over the next few years: fundamentally there's many different ways to generate power (rather than just one company that can produce the EUV tools needed for the... chips themselves) and the supply chains are simpler and easier to ramp. You can do jet engines bolted to the ground. Ship engines. Diesel recips from auto manufacturers with declining volumes. Fuel cells. Each category alone delivers tens of gigawatts by end of decade. Combined, hundreds. Even if energy costs double, a GPU goes from $1.40/hr to $1.50/hr. Nobody notices a dime when the models are improving so fast the value dwarfs the cost. Even if you don't add more power, but simply add more batteries, you can unlock 20% more of the US's terawatt scale power grid. This is because grid utilities want to make sure they're sized for peak summer load that hits a few hours a year. With enough batteries, you can make this guarantee, even without turning on more power plants! Fundamentally, there's a lot of different ways to bring power online over the next few years. Building more logic and memory is far more difficult and centralized, so that's where Dylan thinks the bottleneck will be.show more

Dwarkesh Patel

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🚨 ELON MUSK: "Batteries are going to be a massive thing. The scale of battery demand, I think not that many people appreciate just how gigantic the scale of battery demand is. The sustained power output from the US grid is around 1 TW, but average usage is less than half of it. If you add batteries to the mix, you can run the power plants 24/7 at full capacity. More than doubling the energy output per year of the United States, just with batteries."

🚨 ELON MUSK: "Batteries are going to be a massive thing. The scale of battery demand, I think not that many people appreciate just how gigantic the scale of battery demand is. The sustained power output from the US grid is around 1 TW, but average usage is less than half of it. If you add batteries to the mix, you can run the power plants 24/7 at full capacity. More than doubling the energy output per year of the United States, just with batteries."

DogeDesigner

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ELON MUSK: The Future of AI Power is in Space, Not on Earth. "Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun's power are you harnessing? You realize you have to go to space and you can't scale very much on Earth. All of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt per hour on average. So you know, if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that's quite a lot. It's actually very difficult to build power plants and then you don't just need the power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment. Need the electrical transformers to run the transformers. You can build power plants. That's what we did at xAI for Colossus 2. It's very difficult to scale other forms of power. You can scale potentially solar. Solar cells are already very cheap. Now put it in space and it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low. By far, the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close. It'll be an order of magnitude easier to scale five years from now. My prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth."

ELON MUSK: The Future of AI Power is in Space, Not on Earth. "Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun's power are you harnessing? You realize you have to go to space and you can't scale very much on Earth. All of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt per hour on average. So you know, if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that's quite a lot. It's actually very difficult to build power plants and then you don't just need the power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment. Need the electrical transformers to run the transformers. You can build power plants. That's what we did at xAI for Colossus 2. It's very difficult to scale other forms of power. You can scale potentially solar. Solar cells are already very cheap. Now put it in space and it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low. By far, the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close. It'll be an order of magnitude easier to scale five years from now. My prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth."

DogeDesigner

37,916 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

ELON: BATTERIES COULD DOUBLE U.S. ENERGY WITHOUT BUILDING A SINGLE PLANT Elon said the U.S. already produces far more power than it actually uses at any given moment. The problem isn’t generation, it’s timing. Huge amounts of energy go unused every night while demand spikes during the day. Storage, not new plants, is the missing link. In his view, batteries alone could unlock a massive increase in usable energy. “Peak power output of the U.S. is around 1.1 terawatts, but the average power usage is only half a terawatt. So if you just buffer the energy, charge the batteries at night, discharge during the day, without incremental capital expenses, without building new power plants, you can double the energy throughput of the U.S. The energy output per year can double with batteries. And do we have those batteries?” Source: Moonshots

ELON: BATTERIES COULD DOUBLE U.S. ENERGY WITHOUT BUILDING A SINGLE PLANT Elon said the U.S. already produces far more power than it actually uses at any given moment. The problem isn’t generation, it’s timing. Huge amounts of energy go unused every night while demand spikes during the day. Storage, not new plants, is the missing link. In his view, batteries alone could unlock a massive increase in usable energy. “Peak power output of the U.S. is around 1.1 terawatts, but the average power usage is only half a terawatt. So if you just buffer the energy, charge the batteries at night, discharge during the day, without incremental capital expenses, without building new power plants, you can double the energy throughput of the U.S. The energy output per year can double with batteries. And do we have those batteries?” Source: Moonshots

Mario Nawfal

50,591 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

ELON: HERE’S HOW WE’LL DOUBLE U.S. ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION “If you look at the total U.S. power generation capability, it's roughly a terawatt, but the average power usage is less than half a terawatt. That's because there are big differences in power usage between day and night. So, the daily and seasonal variations in power consumption mean that the United States, and really every country, is only producing about half as much electrical energy as it could. Because without batteries, there's no effective way to buffer the energy. So, what batteries actually enable is that even if you don't build any incremental power plants, you could double the energy output of the United States just with batteries. This is a super big deal. And, in fact, I think that's really where most of the incremental energy production in the United States is going to come from, is literally batteries. So, a bigger deal than it may seem.” Source: Elon Musk, Tesla Shareholder Meeting, November 6, 2025

ELON: HERE’S HOW WE’LL DOUBLE U.S. ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION “If you look at the total U.S. power generation capability, it's roughly a terawatt, but the average power usage is less than half a terawatt. That's because there are big differences in power usage between day and night. So, the daily and seasonal variations in power consumption mean that the United States, and really every country, is only producing about half as much electrical energy as it could. Because without batteries, there's no effective way to buffer the energy. So, what batteries actually enable is that even if you don't build any incremental power plants, you could double the energy output of the United States just with batteries. This is a super big deal. And, in fact, I think that's really where most of the incremental energy production in the United States is going to come from, is literally batteries. So, a bigger deal than it may seem.” Source: Elon Musk, Tesla Shareholder Meeting, November 6, 2025

Mario Nawfal

309,741 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the AI bottleneck is already moving from model ideas to physical supply chains. "How much of the restriction at this point is physical? I am talking memory shortage, GPU shortage, and electricity." Demis: "That is constraining a lot of the deployment for sure. We see so much more demand for our models - Gemini and the other models that we have - than we can possibly serve." Then the less obvious part: "It does constrain a little bit the research, because you need a lot of chips to be able to experiment on new ideas at big enough scale that you can actually see if they are going to work." And on memory: "The whole supply chain is kind of strained... It still in the end actually comes down to a few suppliers of a few of the key components. Anywhere where there is some kind of constraint on the capacity, there is a sort of choke point." Important framing: The next AI race is not just who has the best model architecture. It is who can secure memory, chips, power, suppliers, and enough experimental capacity to find the next breakthrough before everyone else.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the AI bottleneck is already moving from model ideas to physical supply chains. "How much of the restriction at this point is physical? I am talking memory shortage, GPU shortage, and electricity." Demis: "That is constraining a lot of the deployment for sure. We see so much more demand for our models - Gemini and the other models that we have - than we can possibly serve." Then the less obvious part: "It does constrain a little bit the research, because you need a lot of chips to be able to experiment on new ideas at big enough scale that you can actually see if they are going to work." And on memory: "The whole supply chain is kind of strained... It still in the end actually comes down to a few suppliers of a few of the key components. Anywhere where there is some kind of constraint on the capacity, there is a sort of choke point." Important framing: The next AI race is not just who has the best model architecture. It is who can secure memory, chips, power, suppliers, and enough experimental capacity to find the next breakthrough before everyone else.

Karl Mehta

25,716 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

A major gas field in the UK could supply over 10% of the UK's energy, but that gas isn't destined for the grid. The plan instead is to extract it on site, burn it in a local power plant, and use that electricity to mine bitcoin. The energy will be consumed at the source, because that route is simpler and more profitable. Taxes, regulation and grid constraints all add friction. The gas could power homes. It isn't. Because burning it on site makes more money. That is a damning indictment of UK energy policy.

A major gas field in the UK could supply over 10% of the UK's energy, but that gas isn't destined for the grid. The plan instead is to extract it on site, burn it in a local power plant, and use that electricity to mine bitcoin. The energy will be consumed at the source, because that route is simpler and more profitable. Taxes, regulation and grid constraints all add friction. The gas could power homes. It isn't. Because burning it on site makes more money. That is a damning indictment of UK energy policy.

Electroverse

15,529 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Wind turbines are getting bigger, more efficient, and are delivering higher output. That sounds impressive, but it isn't compared to other sources. A single nuclear plant, for example, produces around 1,750 megawatts. To match that, you need roughly 150 large turbines. Wind uses over 100X more land than nuclear for the same output. And turbines, of course, only produce power when the wind is blowing. Nuclear is constant. Then there's the storage requirements. To make wind reliable, you need batteries. At grid scale, that becomes impossible with current technologies. Wind power remains an expensive pipe dream, lining the pockets of a few at the expense of the many.

Wind turbines are getting bigger, more efficient, and are delivering higher output. That sounds impressive, but it isn't compared to other sources. A single nuclear plant, for example, produces around 1,750 megawatts. To match that, you need roughly 150 large turbines. Wind uses over 100X more land than nuclear for the same output. And turbines, of course, only produce power when the wind is blowing. Nuclear is constant. Then there's the storage requirements. To make wind reliable, you need batteries. At grid scale, that becomes impossible with current technologies. Wind power remains an expensive pipe dream, lining the pockets of a few at the expense of the many.

Electroverse

21,616 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

ELON: "WE'LL HAVE MORE AI CHIPS THAN POWER TO RUN THEM" "The limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power. It's energy. We're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is 5% a year, max. It's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on." Source: Elon Musk

ELON: "WE'LL HAVE MORE AI CHIPS THAN POWER TO RUN THEM" "The limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power. It's energy. We're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is 5% a year, max. It's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on." Source: Elon Musk

Mario Nawfal

40,874 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

ELON: MEGAPACK WILL BE SO POWERFUL, YOU WON’T NEED A SUBSTATION “We keep improving the battery design, so the MegaBlock makes it really easy to deploy battery, you know, utility scale batteries. We’ve just simplified and brought more of the components to be internal to the batteries, so you can just drop off a battery and it works. Hopefully over time we will actually add more and more of the power electronics so that MegaPack will be able to output up to 35 kilovolts directly. You won’t need a substation. You just plug it in and it works.” Source:Tesla

ELON: MEGAPACK WILL BE SO POWERFUL, YOU WON’T NEED A SUBSTATION “We keep improving the battery design, so the MegaBlock makes it really easy to deploy battery, you know, utility scale batteries. We’ve just simplified and brought more of the components to be internal to the batteries, so you can just drop off a battery and it works. Hopefully over time we will actually add more and more of the power electronics so that MegaPack will be able to output up to 35 kilovolts directly. You won’t need a substation. You just plug it in and it works.” Source:Tesla

Mario Nawfal

266,975 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Elon Musk explains the “series of miracles” xAI had to achieve to bring one gigawatt of power online for its supercomputer cluster in Memphis The xAI team coordinated dozens of gas turbines, faced permit challenges in Tennessee, and ultimately moved the power generation just across the border into Mississippi. From there, they had to run high-voltage transmission lines and build an entire power plant on the Mississippi side and it was very difficult to build that But the deeper point is even more important Most people calculate AI power needs by looking only at the GPUs. That is a serious mistake. A real data center also requires substantial power for networking, CPUs, storage, and most critically cooling In Memphis, where summer temperatures are extreme, peak cooling demand can add roughly 40% more power. On top of that, operators must maintain extra capacity so generators can be taken offline for servicing without shutting down the entire system. This redundancy typically adds another 20 to 25 percent When all of these factors are included, Elon stated that approximately 110,000 GB300 GPUs require roughly 330 megawatts of actual power generation This is why building and powering frontier AI data centers is far more difficult and far more capital intensive than it appears from the outside

Elon Musk explains the “series of miracles” xAI had to achieve to bring one gigawatt of power online for its supercomputer cluster in Memphis The xAI team coordinated dozens of gas turbines, faced permit challenges in Tennessee, and ultimately moved the power generation just across the border into Mississippi. From there, they had to run high-voltage transmission lines and build an entire power plant on the Mississippi side and it was very difficult to build that But the deeper point is even more important Most people calculate AI power needs by looking only at the GPUs. That is a serious mistake. A real data center also requires substantial power for networking, CPUs, storage, and most critically cooling In Memphis, where summer temperatures are extreme, peak cooling demand can add roughly 40% more power. On top of that, operators must maintain extra capacity so generators can be taken offline for servicing without shutting down the entire system. This redundancy typically adds another 20 to 25 percent When all of these factors are included, Elon stated that approximately 110,000 GB300 GPUs require roughly 330 megawatts of actual power generation This is why building and powering frontier AI data centers is far more difficult and far more capital intensive than it appears from the outside

X Freeze

140,377 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

ELON MUSK: "The most obvious one is actually solar powered AI satellites, sort of to move the AI to orbit and essentially deep space over time, because there you can actually access over a billion times more energy from the sun in deep space than you can on Earth. The scaling to Kardashev, which is using some non trivial amount of energy from the sun. You kind of have to do space solar power. Like to even use a millionth of a percent of the sun's energy you you really have to be have your solar power in deep space."

ELON MUSK: "The most obvious one is actually solar powered AI satellites, sort of to move the AI to orbit and essentially deep space over time, because there you can actually access over a billion times more energy from the sun in deep space than you can on Earth. The scaling to Kardashev, which is using some non trivial amount of energy from the sun. You kind of have to do space solar power. Like to even use a millionth of a percent of the sun's energy you you really have to be have your solar power in deep space."

DogeDesigner

266,777 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Here’s Elon Musk explaining that SpaceX could launch up to one terawatt per year of AI compute capacity into Earth orbit — equivalent to the power output of roughly 1,000 nuclear power plants. “The next step beyond Earth data centers is our Earth orbital data centers. And we'll be launching with SpaceX orbital data centers at the 100-to-200-gigawatt-per-year level. Not cumulative, per year. And ultimately, we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year of compute from Earth. But what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year? In order to do that, you have to go to the Moon. So by having factories on the Moon, building AI satellites, and having a mass driver, which is the kind of thing you really only learn about in or read about in science fiction, but we're going to make it real. We're actually going to have a mass driver on the Moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude greater. You can go to 1,000 gigawatts or more per year and ultimately get to maybe a millionth and then a thousandth and maybe even a few percent of the Sun's energy.” xAI All-Hands, February 10, 2026

Here’s Elon Musk explaining that SpaceX could launch up to one terawatt per year of AI compute capacity into Earth orbit — equivalent to the power output of roughly 1,000 nuclear power plants. “The next step beyond Earth data centers is our Earth orbital data centers. And we'll be launching with SpaceX orbital data centers at the 100-to-200-gigawatt-per-year level. Not cumulative, per year. And ultimately, we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year of compute from Earth. But what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year? In order to do that, you have to go to the Moon. So by having factories on the Moon, building AI satellites, and having a mass driver, which is the kind of thing you really only learn about in or read about in science fiction, but we're going to make it real. We're actually going to have a mass driver on the Moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude greater. You can go to 1,000 gigawatts or more per year and ultimately get to maybe a millionth and then a thousandth and maybe even a few percent of the Sun's energy.” xAI All-Hands, February 10, 2026

ELON CLIPS

21,962 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Elon Musk: The fundamental limitation on AI is going to be electricity generation. “A few years ago I made a very obvious prediction which is that the limitation on AI will be chips, and it's still chips today. Then, it will be electrical equipment because you need to take power that might be at 300,000 volts, all the way down to 400 volts for the computer. So you need step-down transformers and a lot of them and a lot of cabling and wiring and fuses, it's a lot of transformers, essentially. And the electrical transformer industry is not used to big changes in demand. And then as we solve the transformer shortage, there will be the fundamental electricity generation shortage. We're getting there soon. My guess is people going to start hitting challenges with power generation maybe by middle of next year, end of next year. The question is how many power plants are getting built and how fast can you build a power plant?” CNBC Interview with David Faber, May 20, 2025

Elon Musk: The fundamental limitation on AI is going to be electricity generation. “A few years ago I made a very obvious prediction which is that the limitation on AI will be chips, and it's still chips today. Then, it will be electrical equipment because you need to take power that might be at 300,000 volts, all the way down to 400 volts for the computer. So you need step-down transformers and a lot of them and a lot of cabling and wiring and fuses, it's a lot of transformers, essentially. And the electrical transformer industry is not used to big changes in demand. And then as we solve the transformer shortage, there will be the fundamental electricity generation shortage. We're getting there soon. My guess is people going to start hitting challenges with power generation maybe by middle of next year, end of next year. The question is how many power plants are getting built and how fast can you build a power plant?” CNBC Interview with David Faber, May 20, 2025

ELON CLIPS

428,030 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

This post is only for those who real-eyes the power of intention spoken to manifest outcomes. To all the lightworkers and flame bearers, if we can get a few thousand people to speak these words into existence in the next 24 hours (it still works after but more powerful in next 24 hours) we can change the outcome of this energetic powerplay that the controllers are trying to manifest with the war broadcast. 20 minutes of focus and intention can change everything. If you are unable to just take 20 minutes to change everything you can still help by hitting like so others can see it. Sharing will amplify even more. THANK YOU!

This post is only for those who real-eyes the power of intention spoken to manifest outcomes. To all the lightworkers and flame bearers, if we can get a few thousand people to speak these words into existence in the next 24 hours (it still works after but more powerful in next 24 hours) we can change the outcome of this energetic powerplay that the controllers are trying to manifest with the war broadcast. 20 minutes of focus and intention can change everything. If you are unable to just take 20 minutes to change everything you can still help by hitting like so others can see it. Sharing will amplify even more. THANK YOU!

Jeff Berwick

15,790 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

The cheapest place to put AI will be space. Elon Musk says solar panels in space produce 5 times more power than on the ground. No atmosphere, no clouds, no day-night cycle. No batteries needed. And critically, no permits. Scaling energy on Earth means fighting land use regulations, environmental reviews, and grid interconnection queues that take years. Space has none of that. The math gets wild fast. SpaceX could launch hundreds of gigawatts of AI compute into orbit annually. That's more compute than currently exists on Earth. Ten thousand Starship launches per year. One launch every hour. And you only need 20 to 30 ships to sustain that cadence. Earth gets about half a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A millionth of the Sun's energy is 100,000 times all of civilization's current electricity production. The AI race is not a software race. It is a power plant race. And software people are about to get a very hard lesson in hardware.

The cheapest place to put AI will be space. Elon Musk says solar panels in space produce 5 times more power than on the ground. No atmosphere, no clouds, no day-night cycle. No batteries needed. And critically, no permits. Scaling energy on Earth means fighting land use regulations, environmental reviews, and grid interconnection queues that take years. Space has none of that. The math gets wild fast. SpaceX could launch hundreds of gigawatts of AI compute into orbit annually. That's more compute than currently exists on Earth. Ten thousand Starship launches per year. One launch every hour. And you only need 20 to 30 ships to sustain that cadence. Earth gets about half a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A millionth of the Sun's energy is 100,000 times all of civilization's current electricity production. The AI race is not a software race. It is a power plant race. And software people are about to get a very hard lesson in hardware.

Shruti

11,700 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

"We have a supply-demand problem in energy today and we need more supply." Base Power CEO Zach Dell and Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller on why distributed power is the answer — and what's standing in the way: "We can deploy that capacity much faster and much cheaper than you can in a centralized way. You can do it on-site, and so you can circumvent the transmission constraints of the existing grid." "The way that you interconnect and get residential batteries permitted is completely different. Sometimes different not only at the state level, at the city level, at the AHJ level. That makes our job a lot harder." Chase on what it will take to get there: "A lot of people get scared about the amount of power that data centers are going to consume. They have a fixed pie mindset. We have the technology, the know-how, the capital. It's really about having clarity on the permitting process and the will to do so. It can create a really abundant future for everyone." The Hill & Valley Forum 2026 The Hill & Valley Forum Base Power Crusoe James Burnham

"We have a supply-demand problem in energy today and we need more supply." Base Power CEO Zach Dell and Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller on why distributed power is the answer — and what's standing in the way: "We can deploy that capacity much faster and much cheaper than you can in a centralized way. You can do it on-site, and so you can circumvent the transmission constraints of the existing grid." "The way that you interconnect and get residential batteries permitted is completely different. Sometimes different not only at the state level, at the city level, at the AHJ level. That makes our job a lot harder." Chase on what it will take to get there: "A lot of people get scared about the amount of power that data centers are going to consume. They have a fixed pie mindset. We have the technology, the know-how, the capital. It's really about having clarity on the permitting process and the will to do so. It can create a really abundant future for everyone." The Hill & Valley Forum 2026 The Hill & Valley Forum Base Power Crusoe James Burnham

The Hill & Valley Forum

13,799 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

The first question I asked Elon Musk: What’s the point of sending GPUs into space? The whole idea behind orbital data centers is that if the launch costs continue to drop, it will become cheaper to put GPUs in orbit than to build power plants on Earth. The problem with this argument is that energy is only about 15% of a datacenter’s lifetime cost. The chips themselves are around 70%. And you still have to launch those to space! Elon kept returning to one point over and over again: It will simply not be physically possible to scale power production to the scale needed for AI on Earth. He kept pointing out the bottlenecks we’ve already run into on Earth: You can’t plug into the utilities - the interconnect queues are too long. You can’t do behind-the-meter natural gas and generate power yourself - lead times for turbines stretch past 2030. You can’t do solar on Earth, because of permits, and because of the tariffs. For it to make economical sense to shift compute to space, all of the following things would need to be true: - Power generation on Earth hits a ceiling, or AI demand outstrips every terrestrial option (for context, 1 TW of solar power is only 1% of the land area of the US, and AI currently only uses about 20 GW globally). - Chip production scales faster than power generation (because Elon builds TeraFab). It would be surprising if building and placing solar panels turned out to be harder than scaling semiconductor manufacturing. - Starship reaches thousands of launches per year. In that world, Elon wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders. And if those 3 conditions aren’t met? Well, on Earth, xAI is just gonna be one of the pack anyways - and there’s no market for the 4th best AI model. Elon’s comparative advantage was never going to be navigating utility interconnect queues or filing permits faster than Google. His advantage is SpaceX. So why not just bet on the world where SpaceX becomes the kingmaker? I asked Elon what that world looks like. 100 GW = 10,000 starship launches, and he wants to do more than that every year by 2030. That’s one starship launch every hour.

The first question I asked Elon Musk: What’s the point of sending GPUs into space? The whole idea behind orbital data centers is that if the launch costs continue to drop, it will become cheaper to put GPUs in orbit than to build power plants on Earth. The problem with this argument is that energy is only about 15% of a datacenter’s lifetime cost. The chips themselves are around 70%. And you still have to launch those to space! Elon kept returning to one point over and over again: It will simply not be physically possible to scale power production to the scale needed for AI on Earth. He kept pointing out the bottlenecks we’ve already run into on Earth: You can’t plug into the utilities - the interconnect queues are too long. You can’t do behind-the-meter natural gas and generate power yourself - lead times for turbines stretch past 2030. You can’t do solar on Earth, because of permits, and because of the tariffs. For it to make economical sense to shift compute to space, all of the following things would need to be true: - Power generation on Earth hits a ceiling, or AI demand outstrips every terrestrial option (for context, 1 TW of solar power is only 1% of the land area of the US, and AI currently only uses about 20 GW globally). - Chip production scales faster than power generation (because Elon builds TeraFab). It would be surprising if building and placing solar panels turned out to be harder than scaling semiconductor manufacturing. - Starship reaches thousands of launches per year. In that world, Elon wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders. And if those 3 conditions aren’t met? Well, on Earth, xAI is just gonna be one of the pack anyways - and there’s no market for the 4th best AI model. Elon’s comparative advantage was never going to be navigating utility interconnect queues or filing permits faster than Google. His advantage is SpaceX. So why not just bet on the world where SpaceX becomes the kingmaker? I asked Elon what that world looks like. 100 GW = 10,000 starship launches, and he wants to do more than that every year by 2030. That’s one starship launch every hour.

Dwarkesh Patel

405,710 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Elon Musk reveals why he believes the cheapest place to put AI will be space within 36 months "The availability of energy is the issue. Everywhere outside of China, electrical output is more or less flat. The output of chips is growing exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat" "How are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?" "Space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space" "It's always sunny in space. You don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy" "Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night" "My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months" "The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space" "Solar cells are already farcically cheap. In China they're around 25-30 cents a watt. Now put them in space, and it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries" "The moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close" "Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It's actually very difficult to build power plants"

Elon Musk reveals why he believes the cheapest place to put AI will be space within 36 months "The availability of energy is the issue. Everywhere outside of China, electrical output is more or less flat. The output of chips is growing exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat" "How are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?" "Space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space" "It's always sunny in space. You don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy" "Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night" "My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months" "The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space" "Solar cells are already farcically cheap. In China they're around 25-30 cents a watt. Now put them in space, and it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries" "The moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close" "Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It's actually very difficult to build power plants"

Jaynit

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