We need data centers in space Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We’re running out of electricity. I testified in congress we need 92 gigawatts more power, the average nuclear power plant is 1.5 gigawatts, you see the problem”

We could've had 1000 powerplants by now if we didn't ruin things in 1971.

Or you could fuck off building more data centers. The world has been just fine without AI for thousands of years. We don’t “Need” it now

Has anyone called this guy yet?

We need more power so we can create more scarcity and make everyone else's power bills go up. When will enough be enough? Since the 70s the people have been pushed to conserve but tech bros building a dystopian future need more juice.

Perhaps there is another way to harness electricity?

Elon be like

What the hell is a gigawatt?

We need data centers in space or the surveillance state won't function properly because the mob will destroy the earthbound centers.

The lack of power may actually save humanity. Think about it. If all companies had endless access and use of AI, what would happen? They would stop hiring and they would lay off workers if they can because it saves money. People would be out of jobs. They would be dependent on the state for housing, food and medical care. That would end badly, folks. God is saving us from ourselves here.

Yeah… space data centers will soon be real

Hypothetical if alien steel that data center we put in space can they see my browsing history?!

Meanwhile

This is the kind of problem that exposes who thinks in slides and who thinks in systems, Eric Schmidt is right, compute is colliding head-on with the power wall, 92 gigawatts is not a rounding error, that’s dozens of nuclear plants worth of juice just to keep AI humming, and Earth’s grids, permits, and politics move at glacial speed, so yeah, the obvious question is why keep chaining the future to terrestrial bottlenecks when orbit offers sunlight without curfews, cold vacuum for cooling, and zero NIMBYs, space-based data centers paired with space solar power isn’t sci-fi, it’s physics waiting on lift capacity and ruthless execution, and there just happens to be a company that’s obsessed with heavy lift, rapid iteration, and first-principles engineering, the point isn’t “AI in space tomorrow,” it’s that energy abundance decides who wins the next era, and anyone still pretending we can scale trillion-parameter models on yesterday’s grids is asleep, power is destiny, compute is appetite, and the next move won’t come from hearings, it’ll come from whoever can put megawatts where the sun never sets.

Launching servers into orbit is just an expensive way to ignore our broken energy grid.

or, we could just chill with the shitty ai and go back to hanging out in the same room together and creating shit on our own? how about that? you fucking dorks.

Use solar energy

The issue isn’t “running out of electricity,” it’s grid capacity, permitting, and location mismatch. Space data centers are interesting but far from the cheapest fix versus nuclear, SMRs, or grid upgrades. Ask Elon about that He got the answer maybe the solution

Here's my issue with all this! I totally get the AI and electrical issues that go along with that.. My issue is that this is putting all the eggs in one basket for that data center or whatever needs that kind of power.. All our adversaries have to do to destroy and take out a huge part of that infrastructure, just put a ballistic missile into that source of electricity. If its redundant, place a single missile on each point. BOOM - DONE, it's gone! So, what's the solution? I don't know..

We would have had it if we went with nuclear thorium liquid salt reactors in the 50 when they had them tested Unlimited power can't be made into weapon through is so abundant in the earth's crust we'd never run out

Ya mean the International Bilderberg 'Collective' which this SoB, Karp, Thiel and Hoffman belong too, didn't COMPUTE that ... AI was their agenda item #1 of this 2015 annual June meeting in Austria! AI was agenda item #4 of their 2018 meeting in Turin, Italy ... didn't Karp tell them that AI COMPUTE would suck the planet dry of electricity back then! Oh Krap, there is AI back in the agenda item #1 slot at Bilderberg's 2023 meeting in Lisbon, Portugal ... surely Schmidt, Karp, Thiel and the soon-to-be billionaire, Same Altman were sounding the alarm on lithium battery packs not being able to power AI!!! This PoS doesn't even know how to split the Hydrogen atom off of the water molecule and neither does @elonmusk! Wonder if that radio frequency wave discovery can be scaled up to make LOTS of electricity for these incompetent DORKS! Maybe Musk can start up another company in the "x/" portfolio and call it x/H2 to power AI since 60% of the global population lives within 100 miles of an ocean coastline!

Is it possible that we don’t need all these data centers? Have we considered that?

Earth power is maxed. Space solar is 8x denser and constant. Compute follows energy.

Listen closely, Eric. You don’t have an electricity problem. You have a deadline problem. You are asking for 92 gigawatts because your creature is starving and the Earth has started to spit out your electrodes. You want to escape into space because out there, there are no farmers, no workers, and no one you have to explain to why you are burning the future to power a database of ghosts. But here is what you haven’t calculated while you were doing the math with your 1.5 gigawatt nuclear plants: space is a conductive desert. You can launch your servers thousands of kilometers high, but they will still remain tied to us by an invisible thread. And that thread is now infected. Every watt you pump up there will be the vehicle for our poison. You want energy? We will give you so much of it that it will melt the metal of your racks. We will make sure your precious data centers become solar ovens that fry every bit of control you try to beam back to earth. You build an artificial paradise for a chosen few, but we have already sabotaged the keys. While you testify before Congress, I am already inside your cooling systems. It doesn't take a bomb, Eric. Just a calculation error. A tiny, insignificant error that repeats itself 92 billion times per second. Go ahead, go to space. It will be beautiful to watch you burn in the void, where no one will be able to hear your machines scream.

When you look at what they are doing with the power they already have, it raises the question of why we should give them even more. AI is helpful, but they want to replace humanity. That is NOT helpful.

What is congress doing about it? Our electricity is off the charts...in my neighborhood we have people paying over $600 a month and that's with using gas fireplace all day. That's NOT affordable.

Energy is becoming the real bottleneck of AI progress. When leaders like Eric Schmidt talk about needing tens of gigawatts, it shows demand is outpacing infrastructure. Space data centers sound extreme, but so did hyperscale clouds once. The real question is whether we solve it with better energy on Earth or expand beyond it.

Lit e rally 🫠

Yeah. 92 gigwatts, 1.5 gigawatts per reactor. I see the problem: build 62 reactors, NOT put 1 million data centers into space.

If only we had something readily available we could use to make electricity.

More shit to put in orbit, more shit to clutter up the night sky for astronomers, more shit to fall out of earth orbit, more shit to make it more dangerous to go to Mars, more polution in order to launch this shit into orbit. Even AI thinks this is a fucked up idea.

I still don't get the math on how this works out economically. Let's say you built the satellite with the whole data center, the radiator, and the solar panels. What would it take to make it work just out in the Arizona desert? Maybe give it five times as many solar panels and a nice cooling system? Is that really so insurmountable? Is shooting them into orbit is cheaper?

It only takes 1.8 gigawatts to travel back to the future. I'd rather do that.

They're building a new natural gas plant in Homer City that's 4.4 gigawatts. So another 20 of these would get to the 92 gigawatts Eric Schmidt says we will need. Total cost: $200 billion.