Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

So are, are there really three hours of questions, or, or how's it-

Yeah.

Are you fucking serious?

Yeah. [laughing] You don't think there's a lot to talk about, Elon?

Holy shit, man. [laughing]

I mean, it's the most interesting point. All the storylines are kind of converging-

Yeah

-right now, so we'll, we'll see how much-

It's almost like I planned it.

Exactly. [laughing] Well, we're getting there.

I would never do such a thing. [laughing]

So as you know better than anybody else, uh, the total cost of ownership of a data center, only ten to fifteen percent is energy, and that's the part you're presumably saving by moving this into space. Most of it's the GPUs. If they're in space, it's harder to service them or you can't service them, and so the depreciation cycle goes down on them. So like, it's just way more expensive to have the GPUs in space, pr- presumably. What's the reason to put them in space?

Um, well, the availability of energy is the issue. Um, so, uh, I mean, if you look at, at electrical output, um, outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It's very, you know, maybe a slight increase, but pr- pretty much flat. China has a rapid increase in el- in electrical output. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity, um, especially as you scale? Uh, the output of chips is growing, um, pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So where- how are you going to turn the chips on?

Um, uh, you know-

Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies? [laughing]

You, I mean, you're famously, you're, you're famously a big fan of solar. One terawatt of solar power, so with a twenty-five percent capacity factor, like four terawatts of solar panels, it's like one percent of the land area of the United States, and that's like far... In the- we're in the singularity when we've got one terawatt of data centers, right? Um, so what are we running out of exactly?

How far into the singularity are you, though? [laughing]

You tell me.

Yeah, exactly. So, so I think, I think we'll, [chuckles] we'll find we're in the singularity and like, "Oh, okay, we've still got a long way to go." [laughing]

But is this like a- is the plan to, like, put it into space after we've covered Nevada in solar panels?

I think it's pretty hard to cover Nevada in solar panels. You have to get, like, permits from, like, the permits for... Try getting the permits for that. See what happens. [laughing]

So space is really a reg- it's really a regulatory play. It's, like, harder to, harder to build on land than it is in space.

It's, it's harder to scale, um, on the ground than it is to scale in space. Uh, but, but also, the, the- y- you're going to get about five times the, um, effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don't need batteries. Um, I almost wore my other shirt, which says, "It's always sunny in space," which it is. [laughing] So, um, because you don't have a day/night cycle or, uh, seasonality, uh, clouds, uh, or, or an atmosphere in space, uh, because the atmosphere alone, um, uh, results in about a thirty percent, uh, lo- loss of energy. Um, so, uh, so you can- for any given, uh, solar panels can do about five times more, uh, power in space than on the ground, and you avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. Uh, so it's, it's actually much cheaper to do it in space. And I, I- my prediction is that, um, it will be by far the cheapest place to put, uh, AI, will be space, in thirty-six months or less, maybe thirty months.