SpaceX acquires xAI. Elon Musk explains putting data centers in space in a fantastical, far-reaching update:
By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space! Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.
I thought there was consensus that it was bad to burn through GPUs in space where it’s nearly impossible to maintain them? It’s gotta be more practical to build huge solar farms on earth. Here we can use the new energy for more than just AI training.
There’s also this part which I could barely understand until I looked up several phrases in it:
By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.
I’m very much in favor of space exploration. Excited for the Artemis mission, now set for next month. But rail launchers on the moon and this enormous amount of energy — hundreds of times what the whole world uses right now — is delusional science fiction. I’m a little sad to type that because I hate to be a pessimist about the future… It’s just too far out, while we have many real problems on earth that need addressing.
