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Jeff Bezos: Orbital Compute > Terrestrial Compute "in the sun synchronous orbit, you're in daylight almost all the time, 99 plus percent. And so your solar cells are working for you the whole time. There are a lot of questions about orbital data centers and can it really work...

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58,714 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Full interview with Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital on SpaceX IPO. "Orbital compute will be the lowest cost provider of inference compute by at least a factor of three over large scale terrestrial compute. As we've learned in any commodity industry, if you're the lowest cost provider, you are going to crush." We discuss: - the growth trajectory and why retail will likely understand this company better than Wall Street does. - Starship and why it's more technically derisked than the public realizes - orbital compute, an inevitability - thermal engineering advantages - his view on why meaningful launch competition is at least a decade away - why Starlink and direct-to-cell will make SpaceX the world's lowest-cost broadband and mobile provider 👇
17:59

Full interview with Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital on SpaceX IPO. "Orbital compute will be the lowest cost provider of inference compute by at least a factor of three over large scale terrestrial compute. As we've learned in any commodity industry, if you're the lowest cost provider, you are going to crush." We discuss: - the growth trajectory and why retail will likely understand this company better than Wall Street does. - Starship and why it's more technically derisked than the public realizes - orbital compute, an inevitability - thermal engineering advantages - his view on why meaningful launch competition is at least a decade away - why Starlink and direct-to-cell will make SpaceX the world's lowest-cost broadband and mobile provider 👇

Mo Islam

229,096 views • 2 months ago

Atreides' Gavin Baker says that once Starship is reusable, the economics of orbital compute crush the economics of terrestrial compute. He lays out the math: "Once $SPCX can reuse Starship, the math for orbital compute becomes pretty compelling." "It's $60B to bring on a GW terrestrially. $25B is power and cooling — you don't need that in space. And so the right comp for that $35B in IT equipment — GPU, CPU, switches, memory, storage — is that $25B [in power and cooling] vs. the cost of launch." "And once Starship is reusable, I think the cost to launch is $5B. So that means you can put a GW into space for [$40B]. The GW on earth is $60B."
0:53

Atreides' Gavin Baker says that once Starship is reusable, the economics of orbital compute crush the economics of terrestrial compute. He lays out the math: "Once $SPCX can reuse Starship, the math for orbital compute becomes pretty compelling." "It's $60B to bring on a GW terrestrially. $25B is power and cooling — you don't need that in space. And so the right comp for that $35B in IT equipment — GPU, CPU, switches, memory, storage — is that $25B [in power and cooling] vs. the cost of launch." "And once Starship is reusable, I think the cost to launch is $5B. So that means you can put a GW into space for [$40B]. The GW on earth is $60B."

TBPN

102,778 views • 2 months ago

.Shaun Maguire says SpaceX's data center deal with Google may suggest there is something fundamentally different about the company's terrestrial compute. "I think a lot of people were surprised by the Anthropic and Google announcements. And I think a lot of people are getting the wrong takeaway there." "The way a lot of people are interpreting that is it's like, 'oh, we're just in this temporary compute shortage. And so anyone's willing to work with anyone, and they're willing to pay any price for compute.'" "I think that might be a reasonable way to look at the Anthropic announcement. I don't think that makes sense for looking at the Google announcement." "To me, I think an alternative hypothesis is that SpaceX's terrestrial compute is not actually a commodity. There's something that's better about it than other people's terrestrial compute."
2:22

.Shaun Maguire says SpaceX's data center deal with Google may suggest there is something fundamentally different about the company's terrestrial compute. "I think a lot of people were surprised by the Anthropic and Google announcements. And I think a lot of people are getting the wrong takeaway there." "The way a lot of people are interpreting that is it's like, 'oh, we're just in this temporary compute shortage. And so anyone's willing to work with anyone, and they're willing to pay any price for compute.'" "I think that might be a reasonable way to look at the Anthropic announcement. I don't think that makes sense for looking at the Google announcement." "To me, I think an alternative hypothesis is that SpaceX's terrestrial compute is not actually a commodity. There's something that's better about it than other people's terrestrial compute."

Jack Kuhr

44,998 views • 2 months ago

Sam Altman made some important remarks on the Cite Your Sources with Alex Heath: > Not worried about OpenAI's compute buildout plan; believes will use all of their compute very profitability > Concerned about "unsustainable silliness" of random new neoclouds popping up and claiming to build gigantic lines of compute without the revenue and customer to support. > Believes they can confidently pay for all of the compute they have committed to. > "Cost is no object" for compute. People believe they can build compute and someone will buy it at a higher price. > OpenAI has no plan of selling compute externally anytime soon. $NVDA $NBIS $AMD $MRVL $AVGO $IREN $CRWV
1:38

Sam Altman made some important remarks on the Cite Your Sources with Alex Heath: > Not worried about OpenAI's compute buildout plan; believes will use all of their compute very profitability > Concerned about "unsustainable silliness" of random new neoclouds popping up and claiming to build gigantic lines of compute without the revenue and customer to support. > Believes they can confidently pay for all of the compute they have committed to. > "Cost is no object" for compute. People believe they can build compute and someone will buy it at a higher price. > OpenAI has no plan of selling compute externally anytime soon. $NVDA $NBIS $AMD $MRVL $AVGO $IREN $CRWV

P Equity Research 📰

126,977 views • 2 days ago

"Compute is the currency of the future." "Compute is the new OIL." Great, so how do I invest? You can play with the NVIDIA stock, or spin up an AI-Ready Data Center. Challenges of Spinning up AI-Ready Compute: Cost: Even a small cluster of H100 machines is upward to $10M GPU Scarcity: Unallocated or “underutilized” H100, A100, and RTX4090 GPUs are almost non-existent. Very Specific Physical & Technical Requirements: A data center with the right infrastructure is also very rare. There are only 10 in North America that deploy thousands of GPUs, in the open market. Domain Expertise: Teams of experts with the years of experience required to operate, deploy, and manage AI compute at scale are as rare as the GPUs they deploy. Exabits checks all of these boxes and we are the premier Compute Tokenization Platform. We are backed by REAL COMPUTE used by REAL CUSTOMERS.
0:30

"Compute is the currency of the future." "Compute is the new OIL." Great, so how do I invest? You can play with the NVIDIA stock, or spin up an AI-Ready Data Center. Challenges of Spinning up AI-Ready Compute: Cost: Even a small cluster of H100 machines is upward to $10M GPU Scarcity: Unallocated or “underutilized” H100, A100, and RTX4090 GPUs are almost non-existent. Very Specific Physical & Technical Requirements: A data center with the right infrastructure is also very rare. There are only 10 in North America that deploy thousands of GPUs, in the open market. Domain Expertise: Teams of experts with the years of experience required to operate, deploy, and manage AI compute at scale are as rare as the GPUs they deploy. Exabits checks all of these boxes and we are the premier Compute Tokenization Platform. We are backed by REAL COMPUTE used by REAL CUSTOMERS.

Exabits

13,896 views • 2 years ago

Sam Altman in a new interview says Orbital Data Centers are not going to matter at scale this decade: “I honestly think the idea, with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous. If you do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power on earth and to say nothing how you are going to fix a broken GPU in space— they do break a lot unfortunately— we are not there yet. There will be a time, space is great for a lot of things, Orbital Data Centers are not something that is going to matter at scale this decade.” This clip isn’t going to age well for Sam.
0:39

Sam Altman in a new interview says Orbital Data Centers are not going to matter at scale this decade: “I honestly think the idea, with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous. If you do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power on earth and to say nothing how you are going to fix a broken GPU in space— they do break a lot unfortunately— we are not there yet. There will be a time, space is great for a lot of things, Orbital Data Centers are not something that is going to matter at scale this decade.” This clip isn’t going to age well for Sam.

Nic Cruz Patane

72,344 views • 6 months ago

Matthew on how energy goes from 10% of the cost of compute today to 20 or 30% by 2029. From our conversation and his letter: "The cost of power will be much higher than the hyperscalers underwrote, given their reliance on natural gas-fueled generation priced off a fuel that will cost far more than they assumed. High-cost fuel cells, behind-the-meter generation, bring-your-own-gen projects, emergency power procurement auctions. Virtually every solution being pursued by AI compute requires more natural gas. Each one accelerates our thesis. If you plug in all of this compute and it's gas powered, and we think gas could double or triple structurally even without weather, it could end up being 20 or 30% of the cost of compute by 2029. One of your recent guests listened and he said, 'Well, this sounds like DRAM two years ago.' Slowly at first, and then all at once."
0:47

Matthew on how energy goes from 10% of the cost of compute today to 20 or 30% by 2029. From our conversation and his letter: "The cost of power will be much higher than the hyperscalers underwrote, given their reliance on natural gas-fueled generation priced off a fuel that will cost far more than they assumed. High-cost fuel cells, behind-the-meter generation, bring-your-own-gen projects, emergency power procurement auctions. Virtually every solution being pursued by AI compute requires more natural gas. Each one accelerates our thesis. If you plug in all of this compute and it's gas powered, and we think gas could double or triple structurally even without weather, it could end up being 20 or 30% of the cost of compute by 2029. One of your recent guests listened and he said, 'Well, this sounds like DRAM two years ago.' Slowly at first, and then all at once."

Patrick OShaughnessy

115,633 views • 1 month ago

Shaun Maguire on SpaceX IPO: "Starship is the railroad to space." "In 2019, it was very predictable that Starlink would work and produce a massive amount of revenue, and we called that right." "We're now in a very similar point to where Starlink was in 2019 with AI infrastructure and orbital compute." "I think people are really underestimating how far along the orbital compute product is right now." On the $22 trillion TAM: "What do you think is the TAM for intelligence? What's the TAM for all compute infrastructure 50 years from now?" "People are underappreciating how much infrastructure is going to be built in space and how much easier it is to access energy in space." "We're at the beginning of this AI era, and we're going to double or triple the total amount of intelligence that we have access to over the next decade — so yes, I absolutely believe in the TAM, and I would even argue it's an underestimate." How much is the "railroad to space" worth in the era of AI and orbital compute? Now imagine the railroad company also owns the AI and the orbital compute. Elon Musk Shaun Maguire
2:24

Shaun Maguire on SpaceX IPO: "Starship is the railroad to space." "In 2019, it was very predictable that Starlink would work and produce a massive amount of revenue, and we called that right." "We're now in a very similar point to where Starlink was in 2019 with AI infrastructure and orbital compute." "I think people are really underestimating how far along the orbital compute product is right now." On the $22 trillion TAM: "What do you think is the TAM for intelligence? What's the TAM for all compute infrastructure 50 years from now?" "People are underappreciating how much infrastructure is going to be built in space and how much easier it is to access energy in space." "We're at the beginning of this AI era, and we're going to double or triple the total amount of intelligence that we have access to over the next decade — so yes, I absolutely believe in the TAM, and I would even argue it's an underestimate." How much is the "railroad to space" worth in the era of AI and orbital compute? Now imagine the railroad company also owns the AI and the orbital compute. Elon Musk Shaun Maguire

KanekoaTheGreat

39,709 views • 2 months ago

I think most investors are misunderstanding how soon orbital compute will ramp 99% of the difficulty was Starship The satellites themselves are a similar level of complexity as Starlink The bottleneck is Starship, which I believe is almost here
1:41

I think most investors are misunderstanding how soon orbital compute will ramp 99% of the difficulty was Starship The satellites themselves are a similar level of complexity as Starlink The bottleneck is Starship, which I believe is almost here

Shaun Maguire

188,172 views • 2 months ago

🚨ELON: AI COMPUTE WILL BE CHEAPEST IN SPACE “Once we get solar domestically at scale and launch Starship at scale, the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space. With full reusability, propellant cost per flight is close to a million dollars... That’s about a million dollars to transport 10 megawatts of AI compute.” Source: Philip Johnston
1:29

🚨ELON: AI COMPUTE WILL BE CHEAPEST IN SPACE “Once we get solar domestically at scale and launch Starship at scale, the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space. With full reusability, propellant cost per flight is close to a million dollars... That’s about a million dollars to transport 10 megawatts of AI compute.” Source: Philip Johnston

Mario Nawfal

35,283 views • 8 months ago

In our last conversation, Gavin said data centers in space will be the most important thing in 3-4 years. He explains that means "racks in space" and thinks orbital compute will solve the watts shortage: "When people hear data centers in space, they picture a Pentagon-sized building in space. That's not what it is. A Blackwell rack weighs 3,000 pounds. It's eight feet high. Four feet deep. Three feet wide. It's racks in space. It has these solar wings that are probably 500 feet long on each side. You keep it in a Sun-synchronous orbit, so those solar panels are always in the sun. And then because it's in an exactly Sun-synchronous orbit, the radiator, which extends behind it for hundreds of feet is in the shade. You link these racks using lasers traveling through vacuum which are already on every Starlink. SpaceX operates the world's largest satellite fleet, which is 98 or 99% of all satellites in orbit. Every Starlink, they're cooling it today. I think Starlink V3 is going to operate at 20 kilowatts. A Blackwell rack is only 100 kilowatts. And people talk a lot about density. Well, if you're connecting the racks with lasers through vacuum, you can make the rack bigger physically. In space, there's all sorts of things that SpaceX can do. They also now operate the largest data center on Earth. I've spent a lot of time at Starbase over the years, and I've talked to a lot of SpaceX engineers. It is the most talented group of engineers on planet Earth, and they're very confident they have solved this."
2:30

In our last conversation, Gavin said data centers in space will be the most important thing in 3-4 years. He explains that means "racks in space" and thinks orbital compute will solve the watts shortage: "When people hear data centers in space, they picture a Pentagon-sized building in space. That's not what it is. A Blackwell rack weighs 3,000 pounds. It's eight feet high. Four feet deep. Three feet wide. It's racks in space. It has these solar wings that are probably 500 feet long on each side. You keep it in a Sun-synchronous orbit, so those solar panels are always in the sun. And then because it's in an exactly Sun-synchronous orbit, the radiator, which extends behind it for hundreds of feet is in the shade. You link these racks using lasers traveling through vacuum which are already on every Starlink. SpaceX operates the world's largest satellite fleet, which is 98 or 99% of all satellites in orbit. Every Starlink, they're cooling it today. I think Starlink V3 is going to operate at 20 kilowatts. A Blackwell rack is only 100 kilowatts. And people talk a lot about density. Well, if you're connecting the racks with lasers through vacuum, you can make the rack bigger physically. In space, there's all sorts of things that SpaceX can do. They also now operate the largest data center on Earth. I've spent a lot of time at Starbase over the years, and I've talked to a lot of SpaceX engineers. It is the most talented group of engineers on planet Earth, and they're very confident they have solved this."

Patrick OShaughnessy

268,098 views • 3 months ago

A single gigawatt of orbital compute requires roughly 200 Starship launches and Elon Musk is not satisfied with gigawatts (Save this). The target is 100 gigawatts of orbital compute per year which means SpaceX is staring down a launch requirement that no organization in human history has ever attempted at anything close to that scale. He acknowledges that scaling to gigawatts per year in orbit is a very hard challenge, but then points to something most people have missed entirely, SpaceX has already demonstrated the foundational capability, because building and launching thousands of Starlink satellites per year is the same industrial problem applied to a different payload. When you understand the orbital compute satellite as a larger version of Starlink V3 with an Nvidia GPU rack at the center instead of a communications payload, the manufacturing and launch scaling challenge stops looking like science fiction and starts looking like a production ramp. The infrastructure to support that ramp is already being built. SpaceX is currently capacitizing for thousands of launches per year, two launch towers and pads in South Texas are operational, the first pad at Cape Canaveral is nearly complete, a second is on the way at Launch Complex 37, and additional locations are already in discussion. As the CFO says it "You need to have those cost curves as you ramp up in volume and time, your costs go down." The vision he describes for what this eventually enables is striking in its specificity. He imagines asking Grok a question on his phone, the inference running on an orbital compute satellite, and the answer coming back down through Starlink direct-to-cell, a complete AI query processed entirely in space, from prompt to response, without touching a single terrestrial data center. That moment, he says, is closer than the industry thinks, with initial capability demonstrations possible as soon as next year. The bottleneck that stands between now and that moment is not the satellite design, the cooling physics, or the silicon, all of which SpaceX has already worked through.
4:23

A single gigawatt of orbital compute requires roughly 200 Starship launches and Elon Musk is not satisfied with gigawatts (Save this). The target is 100 gigawatts of orbital compute per year which means SpaceX is staring down a launch requirement that no organization in human history has ever attempted at anything close to that scale. He acknowledges that scaling to gigawatts per year in orbit is a very hard challenge, but then points to something most people have missed entirely, SpaceX has already demonstrated the foundational capability, because building and launching thousands of Starlink satellites per year is the same industrial problem applied to a different payload. When you understand the orbital compute satellite as a larger version of Starlink V3 with an Nvidia GPU rack at the center instead of a communications payload, the manufacturing and launch scaling challenge stops looking like science fiction and starts looking like a production ramp. The infrastructure to support that ramp is already being built. SpaceX is currently capacitizing for thousands of launches per year, two launch towers and pads in South Texas are operational, the first pad at Cape Canaveral is nearly complete, a second is on the way at Launch Complex 37, and additional locations are already in discussion. As the CFO says it "You need to have those cost curves as you ramp up in volume and time, your costs go down." The vision he describes for what this eventually enables is striking in its specificity. He imagines asking Grok a question on his phone, the inference running on an orbital compute satellite, and the answer coming back down through Starlink direct-to-cell, a complete AI query processed entirely in space, from prompt to response, without touching a single terrestrial data center. That moment, he says, is closer than the industry thinks, with initial capability demonstrations possible as soon as next year. The bottleneck that stands between now and that moment is not the satellite design, the cooling physics, or the silicon, all of which SpaceX has already worked through.

Milk Road AI

67,868 views • 2 months ago

This is the next big plan for SpaceX: AI Data Centers in Space. • To achieve even a small fraction of a Kardashev Type II civilization (harnessing the full energy of the Sun), AI compute will require orders of magnitude more energy than Earth can ever provide. • Earth only intercepts about 1–2 billionths of the Sun’s total energy output. • Massive-scale AI (e.g., a million times more energy than Earth could produce) can only be powered by capturing far more solar energy in space. • Space-based solar-powered AI satellites/compute clusters are therefore inevitable. • In space, sunlight is continuous (no night, no clouds, no atmosphere), so no batteries are needed. • Solar panels in space can be extremely lightweight and cheap (no glass, no storm-proof framing required). • Cooling in space is dramatically easier and simpler: just radiate heat directly into the cold vacuum — no water, no fans, no liquids, no massive cooling infrastructure. • Most of the mass/volume of current supercomputer racks (e.g., GB300) is cooling hardware; in space that largely disappears. • The cost-effectiveness of electricity and compute in space will soon be overwhelmingly better than on Earth. • Elon’s Prediction: within ~5 years (by ~2030), the lowest-cost way to run large-scale AI will be solar-powered satellites in space. • A terawatt/year of AI compute is essentially impossible on Earth with any realistic build-out of power plants. • Scaling both power generation and cooling on Earth at the required rate is physically and politically unfeasible.
3:55

This is the next big plan for SpaceX: AI Data Centers in Space. • To achieve even a small fraction of a Kardashev Type II civilization (harnessing the full energy of the Sun), AI compute will require orders of magnitude more energy than Earth can ever provide. • Earth only intercepts about 1–2 billionths of the Sun’s total energy output. • Massive-scale AI (e.g., a million times more energy than Earth could produce) can only be powered by capturing far more solar energy in space. • Space-based solar-powered AI satellites/compute clusters are therefore inevitable. • In space, sunlight is continuous (no night, no clouds, no atmosphere), so no batteries are needed. • Solar panels in space can be extremely lightweight and cheap (no glass, no storm-proof framing required). • Cooling in space is dramatically easier and simpler: just radiate heat directly into the cold vacuum — no water, no fans, no liquids, no massive cooling infrastructure. • Most of the mass/volume of current supercomputer racks (e.g., GB300) is cooling hardware; in space that largely disappears. • The cost-effectiveness of electricity and compute in space will soon be overwhelmingly better than on Earth. • Elon’s Prediction: within ~5 years (by ~2030), the lowest-cost way to run large-scale AI will be solar-powered satellites in space. • A terawatt/year of AI compute is essentially impossible on Earth with any realistic build-out of power plants. • Scaling both power generation and cooling on Earth at the required rate is physically and politically unfeasible.

Nic Cruz Patane

49,035 views • 8 months ago

ELON: AI WILL HARNESS THE POWER OF THE SUN AND GALAXY FOR COMPUTE "I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, you know, sort of cloud Kardashev two, Kardashev three scale compute. So I guess once you think of artificial intelligence not as a destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of." Source: Jon Hernandez
1:36

ELON: AI WILL HARNESS THE POWER OF THE SUN AND GALAXY FOR COMPUTE "I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, you know, sort of cloud Kardashev two, Kardashev three scale compute. So I guess once you think of artificial intelligence not as a destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of." Source: Jon Hernandez

Mario Nawfal

1,668,060 views • 9 months ago

Today marks the beginning of a new era. Introducing: Cowboy Space Corporation. We are building orbital infrastructure for the AI era: a fully integrated system of rockets and satellites designed to deliver high-performance compute and optical data transmission directly from Low Earth Orbit.
0:50

Today marks the beginning of a new era. Introducing: Cowboy Space Corporation. We are building orbital infrastructure for the AI era: a fully integrated system of rockets and satellites designed to deliver high-performance compute and optical data transmission directly from Low Earth Orbit.

Cowboy Space Corp.

799,679 views • 3 months ago

🚀 Starship will be the 1st fully reusable orbital rocket in history. Liquid oxygen, liquid methane, and a cost-per-launch that could drop below trans-oceanic air freight. Elon put it simply: "The cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant." If that holds, the economics of space will get rewritten entirely. Source: SpaceX, Elon Musk
1:43

🚀 Starship will be the 1st fully reusable orbital rocket in history. Liquid oxygen, liquid methane, and a cost-per-launch that could drop below trans-oceanic air freight. Elon put it simply: "The cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant." If that holds, the economics of space will get rewritten entirely. Source: SpaceX, Elon Musk

Mario Nawfal

51,520 views • 3 months ago

Elon Musk just explained why the SpaceX IPO is an energy story and the energy constraint is why he believes space becomes the only viable path for AI to scale (Save this). The argument he is making is one of the most important and least understood things happening in technology right now. The United States currently consumes roughly 500 gigawatts of electricity on average. To double that capacity which is what continued AI expansion on the current terrestrial trajectory would eventually require would mean building as many power plants as currently exist in the entire country. He is not arguing that this is technically impossible, just that communities are not willing to accept it, that permitting timelines make it unrealistic, and that the hard ceiling on Earth based power generation means the expansion of AI compute will eventually hit a wall that no amount of capital can overcome on the ground. His observation is that in space, that wall does not exist. A solar panel in orbit produces roughly five times more power than the same panel on Earth, operates in continuous sunlight uninterrupted by weather or nighttime, and benefits from the vacuum of space as a completely passive cooling system meaning the two largest operating costs of any terrestrial data center, energy and cooling, are effectively eliminated. He then said that you could theoretically increase harnessed energy by a factor of one million and still be using less than a millionth of the sun's total energy output. This is the underlying physics of why SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch up to one million solar powered AI satellites, and why they described that constellation in their own filing as a first step toward becoming a Kardashev Type II civilization capable of harnessing the full power of the sun. To understand what makes this credible rather than visionary, you need to understand what SpaceX already controls that no other company on earth possesses. Starship, once operating at full cadence, can deliver 100 to 150 tons of payload to orbit per launch, at a target cost per kilogram that is an order of magnitude lower than any existing vehicle. Musk's stated ambition is to scale Starship to 10,000 to 30,000 launches per year, a frequency that would allow the deployment of orbital compute infrastructure at a pace that is currently unimaginable with any existing rocket. He told xAI staff earlier this year that achieving space-based AI at scale will eventually require manufacturing facilities on the moon, building solar panels and heat dissipation structures from lunar silicon and aluminum, and launching them into orbit from there rather than from Earth's surface because the moon's lower gravity makes the economics of launch dramatically more favorable. SpaceX's S-1 filing explicitly states that its launch capabilities could enable massive AI compute satellite constellations with the potential for millions of satellites for orbital data centers, with the first launch potentially occurring as soon as 2028. Google and Alphabet are already in advanced talks with SpaceX about deploying space-based data centers. Starcloud, a startup running Nvidia H100 GPUs in orbit, has already validated that high-performance AI inference workloads can operate in space, with plans to scale to five gigawatts of orbital compute power by 2035. This is why Musk believes the cost crossover happens in two to three years because SpaceX's launch cost trajectory intersects with the accelerating energy constraint on the ground in a way that makes space genuinely cheaper, faster, and less regulated at exactly the moment AI demand is hitting its hardest physical limits.
1:01

Elon Musk just explained why the SpaceX IPO is an energy story and the energy constraint is why he believes space becomes the only viable path for AI to scale (Save this). The argument he is making is one of the most important and least understood things happening in technology right now. The United States currently consumes roughly 500 gigawatts of electricity on average. To double that capacity which is what continued AI expansion on the current terrestrial trajectory would eventually require would mean building as many power plants as currently exist in the entire country. He is not arguing that this is technically impossible, just that communities are not willing to accept it, that permitting timelines make it unrealistic, and that the hard ceiling on Earth based power generation means the expansion of AI compute will eventually hit a wall that no amount of capital can overcome on the ground. His observation is that in space, that wall does not exist. A solar panel in orbit produces roughly five times more power than the same panel on Earth, operates in continuous sunlight uninterrupted by weather or nighttime, and benefits from the vacuum of space as a completely passive cooling system meaning the two largest operating costs of any terrestrial data center, energy and cooling, are effectively eliminated. He then said that you could theoretically increase harnessed energy by a factor of one million and still be using less than a millionth of the sun's total energy output. This is the underlying physics of why SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch up to one million solar powered AI satellites, and why they described that constellation in their own filing as a first step toward becoming a Kardashev Type II civilization capable of harnessing the full power of the sun. To understand what makes this credible rather than visionary, you need to understand what SpaceX already controls that no other company on earth possesses. Starship, once operating at full cadence, can deliver 100 to 150 tons of payload to orbit per launch, at a target cost per kilogram that is an order of magnitude lower than any existing vehicle. Musk's stated ambition is to scale Starship to 10,000 to 30,000 launches per year, a frequency that would allow the deployment of orbital compute infrastructure at a pace that is currently unimaginable with any existing rocket. He told xAI staff earlier this year that achieving space-based AI at scale will eventually require manufacturing facilities on the moon, building solar panels and heat dissipation structures from lunar silicon and aluminum, and launching them into orbit from there rather than from Earth's surface because the moon's lower gravity makes the economics of launch dramatically more favorable. SpaceX's S-1 filing explicitly states that its launch capabilities could enable massive AI compute satellite constellations with the potential for millions of satellites for orbital data centers, with the first launch potentially occurring as soon as 2028. Google and Alphabet are already in advanced talks with SpaceX about deploying space-based data centers. Starcloud, a startup running Nvidia H100 GPUs in orbit, has already validated that high-performance AI inference workloads can operate in space, with plans to scale to five gigawatts of orbital compute power by 2035. This is why Musk believes the cost crossover happens in two to three years because SpaceX's launch cost trajectory intersects with the accelerating energy constraint on the ground in a way that makes space genuinely cheaper, faster, and less regulated at exactly the moment AI demand is hitting its hardest physical limits.

Milk Road AI

12,738 views • 2 months ago

It’s actually happening: Video footage of construction for SpaceX’s project to put AI Data Centers in orbit These Data Centers in space won’t take up earths resources like electricity and water because they will use solar power and be cooled by space “The SpaceX campus in Bastrop County is pushing for an ambitious project that would build what it's calling the AI1 satellite, a data center in space. There are visible signs construction is underway after the tech company announced this large expansion project where the Starlink facility currently sits it's being called the GigaSat factory — The company plans to launch these satellites into Earth's orbit with SpaceX Starships. The company says this tech will be powered by solar energy, and the cold temperatures in space will keep it from overheating” The goal is large scale meaningful production by the end of 2027, supporting an annualized rate of ~1 GW of orbital AI compute. This means thousands of satellites per year, with even more to scale much higher afterward
1:51

It’s actually happening: Video footage of construction for SpaceX’s project to put AI Data Centers in orbit These Data Centers in space won’t take up earths resources like electricity and water because they will use solar power and be cooled by space “The SpaceX campus in Bastrop County is pushing for an ambitious project that would build what it's calling the AI1 satellite, a data center in space. There are visible signs construction is underway after the tech company announced this large expansion project where the Starlink facility currently sits it's being called the GigaSat factory — The company plans to launch these satellites into Earth's orbit with SpaceX Starships. The company says this tech will be powered by solar energy, and the cold temperatures in space will keep it from overheating” The goal is large scale meaningful production by the end of 2027, supporting an annualized rate of ~1 GW of orbital AI compute. This means thousands of satellites per year, with even more to scale much higher afterward

Wall Street Apes

72,007 views • 23 days ago

ELON MUSK: SpaceX could have closer to 10 GW of compute next year. “We are building and deploying compute, I think, faster; our rate of growth certainly is faster than anyone else and our efficiency of compute deployment, I think, is also the highest. So we expect to end this year with over two gigawatts of compute. And probably our cumulative compute online by the end of next year will be several times higher. So it may, let’s say, be closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than five gigawatts of compute. That’s the way to think about it.”
1:01

ELON MUSK: SpaceX could have closer to 10 GW of compute next year. “We are building and deploying compute, I think, faster; our rate of growth certainly is faster than anyone else and our efficiency of compute deployment, I think, is also the highest. So we expect to end this year with over two gigawatts of compute. And probably our cumulative compute online by the end of next year will be several times higher. So it may, let’s say, be closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than five gigawatts of compute. That’s the way to think about it.”

DogeDesigner

31,843 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk: Eventually, 90%+ of all power on Earth will be solar panels with batteries. “Satellites are just solar panels and a battery. That's how all satellites work. And with the Starlink satellite network, there's 7,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, and all they use is solar panels and a battery. And my prediction is, long term, a majority of power on Earth, in fact, eventually it might be like 90% or more of all power on Earth will be solar panels with batteries. That's my prediction.” Tesla All-Hands, March 20, 2025
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Elon Musk: Eventually, 90%+ of all power on Earth will be solar panels with batteries. “Satellites are just solar panels and a battery. That's how all satellites work. And with the Starlink satellite network, there's 7,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, and all they use is solar panels and a battery. And my prediction is, long term, a majority of power on Earth, in fact, eventually it might be like 90% or more of all power on Earth will be solar panels with batteries. That's my prediction.” Tesla All-Hands, March 20, 2025

ELON CLIPS

135,094 views • 1 year ago