What makes you think it isn’t?
edit: these replies aren't going to age well
literally (adverb)
informal : in effect : virtually
Used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible.
Ex: I literally died of embarrassment.
You don't need synergies to justify a merger. They're often used as justification as in paying well above market price. But it has nothing to do with actual justification. You can just have a holding company of businesses
(to be crystal clear, I am making a joke equating the failed SolarCity/Tesla solar shingles to the (generally considered very painful) Herpes Zoster manifestation also called "shingles")
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath...
I cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.
Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
I wish more companies were private and ambitious. I'm tired of companies like Apple making marginal spec bumps to their phones and milking the same products for decades
Any proof of that?
And consider that this is retroactive, meaning it's backpay. They're literally voting to give the guy $50b for work performed. He has a lot of confidence from his investors. And if there were issues, there would be lawsuits. Ironically the only lawsuits that get brought up, like the one about the pay package, are basically trolls, from a guy that had 9 shares.
Besides the parent is the one making a claim that something not above board is going on so burden of proof is on him.
Finally, it's a private company where Musk is the majority shareholder. He's moving money from one pocket into another, and any moves will be reflected in his attempt to raise money with the IPO coming this year.
Why do people online pretend not to understand?
citation needed.
At least what Apple does is real not make believe like everything Musk claims , disappear boring Apple or even boring Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc.
And the world would come to a screeching halt, disappear all of Musk companies and people would barely notice.
You seem to be eager to be sold dreams , that's exactly what vaporware salesmen like Musk hope to find on their path
I think Elon's taken one too many puffs of hopium
You know what's even harder to cool?
> Orbital Data Centers
Perhaps SpaceX incentive is to lie?
(But I do hope it was satire, if not, cooling satelites was/is a big issue and they only have very modest heat creation. A data center would be in a quite different ballpark)
I thought this was a troll by Elon, now I'm leaning towards not. I don't see how whatever you build being dramatically faster and cheaper to do on land, even 100% grid independent with solar and battery. Even if the launch cost was just fuel, everything else that goes into putting data centers in space dwarfs the cost of 4x solar plus battery.
Also, the incredible amount of grift here with the left hand paying the right is scarcely believable. Same story as Tesla buying Solarcity. Board of directors should be ashamed IMO.
To put that in space, based on your numbers, that's 1,250 square kilometers of cooling - an area roughly equivalent in size to Los Angeles
Doesn't stop grifters, tough.
Apparently optimus robots don't work and he needs to start his final grift, space datacenters, while his datacenters on earth are powered by gas turbines.
Most likely he's just trying to bury his epstein involvement where was exposed lying by his own daughter.
SpaceX has made numerous breakthroughs in reusable launch vehicles, human spaceflight, satellite constellation, and rocket propulsion.
SpaceX is the world's dominant space launch provider with its launch cadence eclipsing all others, including private and national programs.
There's obviously quite a lot of autocratist illiberals in tech.
IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
And you also need it to make sense not just from a maintenance standpoint, but from a financial one. In what world would launching what's equivalent to huge facilities that work perfectly fine on the ground make sense? What's the point? If we had a space elevator and nearly free space deployment, then yeah maybe, but how does this plan square with our current reality?
Oh, and don't forget about getting some good shielding for all those precise, cutting-edge processors.
You can have a swarm of small, disposable satellites with laser links between them.
And for data centers, the satellite wouldn't be as far apart as starlight satellites, they would be quite close instead.
And a single cluster today would already require more solar & cooling capacity than all starlink satellites combined.
A watt is a watt and cooling isn't any different just because some heat came from a GPU. But a GPU cluster will consume order of magnitudes more electricity, and will require a proportionally larger surface area to radiate heat compared to a starlink satellite.
Best estimate I can find is that a single starlink satellite uses ~5KW of power and has a radiator of a few square meters.
Power usage for 1000 B200's would be in the ballpark of 1000kW. That's around 1000 square meters of radiators.
Then the heat needs to be dispersed evenly across the radiators, which means a lot of heat pipes.
Cooling GPU's in space will be anything but easy and almost certainly won't be cost competitive with ground-based data centers.
Starlink V2 mini satellites are around 10kW and costs $1-1.5m to launch, for a cost of $100-150m per MW.
So if Gemini is right it seems a datacenter made of Starlinks costs 10-20x more and has a limited lifetime, i.e. it seems unprofitable right now.
In general it seems unlikely to be profitable until there is no more space for solar panels on Earth.
This "Space Datacenter" sounds like biggest bullshit in last decade, which is pretty damn fucking high bar.
I think its pretty clear that Musk has lost his goddamn mind. And the American corporate system and Government seem powerless to do anything.
As for the space datacenter idea, I think this is just a case of extreme marketing that Musk's ventures are so accustomed to. Making huge promises to pump their stocks while the US government looks the other way. When time comes for them to deliver on their promises, they've already invented ten more outrageous ideas to make you forget about what they promised earlier. Hyperloop as a viable mode of transportation, tunnel networks for Teslas, SpaceX vehicles as a mode of transport, X as the new 'everything app', insane timelines for a Musk-led human mission to Mars. They've done it all.
You think I'm joking but I'm not. https://spacenews.com/spacex-files-plans-for-million-satelli...
It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt.
The "datacenters in space" thing is a similar play: it's so obviously dumb that a bunch of smart people have tricked themselves into thinking "wow, SpaceX must have actually figured a way it can work!"; SpaceX has not and it is in fact exactly as stupid as it looks.
No? ISS isn't exempt from legal systems.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
There are a lot of degrees of freedom to optimize something like this.
Spacecraft radiator system using a heat pump - https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883588B1/en
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
>just use even more solar panels
Except it doesn't melt like regular hail so when further storms come up you could end being hit by the same hail more than once :\
You also don't usually use the same exact kind of panels as terrestrial solar farms. Since you are going to space, you spend the extra money to get the highest possible efficiency in terms of W/kg. Terrestrial usually optimizes for W/$ nameplate capacity LCOE, which also includes installation and other costs.
And then there’s that pesky night time and those annoying seasons.
It’s still not even remotely reasonable, but it’s definitely much higher in space.
The two options there are cluttering up the dawn dusk polar orbit more or going to high earth orbit so that you stay out of the shadow of the earth... and geostationary orbits are also in rather high demand.
https://wiki.pvmet.org/index.php?title=Standard_Test_Conditi...
So, a "400W panel" is rated to produce 400W at standard testing conditions.
I'm not sure how relevant that is to the numbers being thrown around in this thread, but thought I'd provide context.
Even with their cheapest home plan, we're getting like 100 Mbps down and maybe 20 to 50 up. So it's just not true at all that you would have connections that are a megabit or two per second.
Which satellites are operating from "deep space"?
However, the amount of available land is fixed and the demand for its use is growing. Solar isn't the only buyer in this real estate market.
Availability of land for solar production isn't remotely a real problem in the near term.
I feel like everyone just lost their mind.
https://inhabitat.com/worlds-largest-solar-project-sahara-de...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/nov/01/solar-power...
(and a retrospective from 2023 - https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ )
Being in orbit gets you 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation costs, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be lightweight.
It's still the same 1TW theoretical peak in space, it's just that you can actually use close to that full capacity all the time, whereas on earth you'd need to over-provision substantially and add storage, so 1TW of panels can only drive perhaps a few hundred GW of average load.
Wouldn’t something like half of the panels be in shadow at any time?
Finally, if we limited ourselves to earth-based raw materials, we would eventually reach a point where the remaining mass of the earth would have less gravitational effect on the satellite fleet than the fleet itself, which would have deleterious effects on the satellite fleet.
Seven reasons are intuitive; I’m sure there are many others.
Same some futuristic sounding shit -> stonks go up -> repeat
All literally while trying to do really bad things everywhere which are going to end up with bodies piled to the fucking ceiling. And not delivering products. And being a proto-nazi.
This needs to break. Now. No one should be rewarding this shit.
2024 revenue of >$100b is quite impressive for not delivering any products
Anyway they just canned the S and X lines so that's done as well...
This schtick is so, so tiresome.
China made 1.8 TW of solar cells in 2025.
The raw materials required to make these are incredibly abundant, we make as much as we need.
I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
But more likely that merger would consist of SpaceX acquiring Tesla and taking it private
Plenty of defense contractors with classified projects are already publicly listed, so this is not uncharted territory.
Lockhead Martin for example: https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...
Gives this level of detail:
> Aeronautics classified program losses $(950)
> MFC classified program losses -
It seems very safe from a national security perspective.
Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
Starship is not all of SpaceX. Saying, maybe because one hates Musk, that SpaceX is going to become irrelevant is wishful thinking.
In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.
Then out of, what, 14 000 active satellites in space more than half have been launched by SpaceX.
SpaceX is, so far, the biggest space success story of the history of the human race (and GP is right in saying that SpaceX is now a national security matter for the US).
Everything has to go right with that, or cybercab will be irrelevant before it works. Same deal. Same bullshitter.
> cybercab will net them $50k per car per year.
Assuming no mass boycotts, nor targeted vandalism. We've already seen both in the last 12 months.
What's keeping Chinese brands out of the USA, isn't keeping them out of Europe or much of anywhere else.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.
With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti...
AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.
Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.
Weirdest freaking timeline.
Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats.
He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
As for FSD, nope. Unless you redefine the word reliable.
Edit: I owned a 2018 Model S as well. Literally the worst fucking car I have ever owned or driven.
Since you are in europe you have no idea how good fsd is.
As I'm in Europe I just get trains.
And everything in the BMW you should be dealing with when driving is on or around the steering wheel.
The article you linked agrees with me. Greatest resolution in the macula which is a span of approximately 6 degrees from the centre.
Sigh...
The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company.
BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war chest" in his battles.
There is also a danger that investors will see xAI as politically dangerous, which will really hurt SpaceX IPO
I'll bet SpaceX financials aren't as great as some people think. Remember, Elon was the guy who tried to take Tesla private, and talked a lot of smack about how silly it is to be a public company. All of a sudden he wants SpaceX to go public?
The biggest selling point to who? Definitely not wall street
How much does it cost to develop and maintain the reusability? Is it worth the trade-offs in lower tons to orbit due to more weight? Is it worth it adjusting the payload into smaller units, including developing things like refueling in LEO?
Idk, I'm not on the inside doing those calculations...
If you want to trust estimates and "best-guesses", neat.
NASA is still here. Unfortunately, NATA fell victim to enshitification by government contracting. NASA even if it wants to simply cannot today design and launch a rocket. :(
Their revenue from Starlink is slated to be bigger than the entire NASA budget this year.
I root for a competitive rocket market, but SpaceX is at the moment critical.
Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder
Your opinion on Boeing being terrible as a shareholder vis-a-vis Tesla would be completely reversed if dividends and capital gains of the 2 companies were to be offered in the forms of miles to be flown on Boeing planes and miles on Teslas Uber/Taxi/Autonomous taxis.
The absolute overperformance on the stock market that Tesla has enjoyed vis-a-vis Boeing is not rooted in a concrete and tangible quality of life improvement for citizens. Not American citizens, nor global citizens for that matter.
It is my opinion that for all public companies in which it is possible to do so government should mandate payment in kind to all shareholders and board members to prevent the excessive promotional , cult and all around BS aspect of marketing to take over and allow people to profit just by riding off those, and Musk is the GOAT at that.
You cannot simultaneously build and launch 10’s of thousands of Starships to deliver 1 million tons of equipment and supplies bound to Mars while also committing to launching 10’s of thousands of Starships to orbit full of satellites.
They would need to quadruple their launch rate, and half of those launches would be Starships bound for Mars, the vast majority of which would never return.
How many Falcon9’s have ever been built? It is incredible to say you can build that many rockets and use up that much fuel on any reasonable time scale. You might as well say the Tesla Roadster version 3 will be a Single Stage to Orbit rocket car.
Add your car to the SpaceX fleet and get paid to own a Tesla!
I never questioned it.
Space is also extremely cold, and if it's as dense as Musk cooling won't be an issue.
The ISS doesn't have problems staying warm, it has problems cooling off.
It does say he's planning an AI sun, I'm guessing that's the temperature you need to run at for radiation to work.
This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Everything I've heard from Musk in the past decade has been against my will and has made me dumber. (no I do not care to verify or know whether the above is true)
Edit: ah fuck ya got me "the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe" what the cultish bullshit is this. In a just world investors would be fleeing in droves from this cuckoo behavior (I know xAI & SpaceX are private)
> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?
For AI a random bit flip doesn't matter much.
Try doing fault injection on a chip some time. You'll see it's significantly easier to cause a crash / reset / hang than to just flip data bits.
'rad-triggered bit flips don't matter with AI' is a lie spoken by people who have obviously never done any digital design in their life.
I would say they probably something a little beefier than consumer hardware and just deal with lots of failures and bit flips.
But cooling is a bigger issue probably?
Well, if you can't get there, you can't do maintenance, so there is zero maintenance :)
- launch costs are so high that doing exotic bespoke engineering might be worth it if it can shave off a few pounds
- once again because launches are expensive and rare, you cannot afford to make mistakes, so everything has to work perfectly
If you are willing to launch to lower orbits, and your launch vehicle is cheap, you are building in bulk, then you can compromise on engineering and accept a few broken sats
Undergrads afaik even high schoolers have built cubesats out of aluminum extrusions, hobbyist solar panels, and a tape measure as an antenna. These things probably dont do that much, but they are up there and they do work.
People are going to Tory Bruno the space datacenters until one day their Claude agent swarm's gonna run in space and they'll be wondering "how did we get here"?
Musk has a documented history of failing to deliver on promises, timescale or no. So it’s best to engage in some actual critical thinking about the claims he is making.
No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large constellation the per-satellite cost of that would be pretty small.
The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.
If the cost per pound, power, regulatory burden, networking, and radiation shielding can be gamed out, as well as the thousand other technically difficult and probably expensive problems that can crop up, they have to sum to less than the effective cost of running that same datacenter here on earth. It's interesting that it doesn't play into Jevon's paradox the way it might otherwise - there's a reduction in power consumption planetside, if compute gets moved to space, but no equivalent expansion since the resource isn't transferable.
I think some sort of space junk recycling would be necessary, especially at the terawatt scale being proposed - at some point vaporizing a bunch of arbitrary high temperature chemistry in the upper atmosphere isn't likely to be conducive to human well-being. Copper and aluminum and gold and so on are also probably worth recovering over allowing to be vaporized. With that much infrastructure in space, you start looking at recycling, manufacturing, collection in order to do cost reductions, so maybe part of the intent is to push into off-planet manufacturing and resource logistics?
The whole thing's fascinating - if it works, that's a lot of compute. If it doesn't work, that's a lot of very expensive compute and shooting stars.
In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable.
If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.
Nothing in there is a lie, but any substance is at best implied. Yes, 1,000,000 tons/year * 100kW/ton is 100GW. Yes, there would be no maintenance and negligible operational cost. Yes, there is some path to launching 1TW/year (whether that path is realistic isn't mentioned, neither what a realistic timeline would be). And then without providing any rationale Elon states his estimate that the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space in a couple years. Elon is famously bad at estimating, so we can also assume that this is his honest belief. That makes a chain of obviously true statements (or close to true, in the case of operating costs), but none of them actually tell us that this will be cheap or economically attractive. And all of them are complete non-sequiturs.
Let's say given component failure rates, you can expect for 20% of the GPUs to fail in that time. I'd say that's acceptable.
And cooling. There is no cold water or air in space.
The basic idea of putting compute in space to avoid inefficient power beaming goes back to NASA in the 60s, but the problem was always the high cost to orbit. Clearly Musk expects Starship will change that.
NVIDIA H200 is 0.7 KW per chip.
To have 100K of GPUs you need 500 ISSs.
ISS cooling is 16KW dissipation. So like 16 H200. Now imagine you want to cool 100k instead of 16.
And all this before we talk about radiation, connectivity (good luck with 100gbps rack-to-rack we have on earth), and what have you.
—
Sometimes I think all this space datacenters talk is just a PR to hush those sad folks that happen to live near the (future) datacenter: “don’t worry, it’s temporary”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
> ROSA is 20 percent lighter (with a mass of 325 kg (717 lb))[3] and one-fourth the volume of rigid panel arrays with the same performance.
And that’s not the current cutting edge in solar panels either. A company can take more risks with technology choices and iterate faster (get current state-of-the-art solar to be usable in space).
The bet they’re making is on their own engineering progress, like they did with rockets, not on sticking together pieces used on the ISS today.
Not that you would want 500+ square meters just for cooling of 200KW
And, mind you, it won’t be a simple copper radiator
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i...
Will that come to be? I'm skeptical, especially within the next several years. Starship would have to perform perfectly, and a lot of other assumptions hold, to make this make sense. But that's the idea.
Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
I think passive cooling (running hot) reduced some of the advantages of undersea compute.
Space is pretty ridicolous, but underwater might genuinely be a good fit in certain areas.
Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.
What if you could keep them in space long enough that by the time they burn up in the atmosphere, there are newer and better GPUs anyway?
Still doesn't seem sustainable to me given launch costs and stuff (hence devil's advocate), but I can sort of see the case if I squint?
In the back on my head this all seemed astronomically far-fetched, but 5.5 million to get 8 GPUs in space... wild. That isn't even a single TB of VRAM.
Are you maybe factoring in the cost to powering them in space in that 5 million?
I suppose that an orbit-ready server is going to cost more, and weigh less.
The water that serves as the coolant will weigh a lot though, but it can double as a radiation shield, and partly as reaction mass for orbital correction and deorbiting.
I wouldn't exactly call this a success, for that matter.
Do you not understand how satellites work? They don't send repair people into space.
This has been a solved problem for decades before the AI gold rush assumed they have some new otherworldly knowledge to teach the rest of the world.
Not trying to be rude - but it's you who doesn't understand how satellites work.
The U.S. has 31 GPS satellites in orbit right now. The operational cost of running those is $2 million/day.
Not to mention the scale of these satellites would be on the order of 10x-100x the size of the ISS, which we do send people to perform maintenance.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/20170929-spacex-updated-c...
Ooh, happy 10th anniversary, FSD?
But, apparently not, to Elon. I will say there's a MASSIVE cost to getting power infrastructure, land, legal stuff done on terra firma; all that just sort of .. goes away when you're deploying to space, at least if you're deploying to space early and fast.
At any rate, I'm intrigued. For reference, people like Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man, are investing in and buying small nuclear reactors for power right now on earth, so we are at some sort of inflection point for datacenter demand. I wonder what the first independent service business is going to be in space. Probably satellite clearing / decommissioning.
He has a habit of saying things that ultimately are just hype building. I do not believe that he really believes in space data-clusters.
I've been told by SpaceX folk that Elon's job is to keep a 20 year view in the future and essentially get folks to work backward from that.
I think I might kind of be sold on data-clusters in space in 20 years.
I can understand if I had lift that cost 1/10 what everyone else in the world paid for it, I'd be even more sold on them.
That said, this newfound enthusiasm of his certainly makes a commercially reasonable path forward to turn xAI stock into spacex stock. Elon takes care of his investors, generally speaking.
The market has had almost a hundred years of being well-regulated, so when a sociopath lies through their teeth, we're inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in the last few years, that regulation has been worn down to nothing, and the result is and was entirely predictable: fraud.
Starlink satellites use space-rated AMD Versal chips: https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-chips-are-powering-newest-sta...
That said xAI might need a bit of a rescue.
> Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man
"King George, another royal blessed by the divine."
Eh. Brand new markets, perhaps. But established markets in the US favor incumbents and encourage monopoly.
We've reached levels of billionaire worship that would make any court jester of the 1400's blush
That said, How do you (accurately) describe Ellison?
You just responded to one of them.
You need both power infrastructure and structures to build within for deploying in space too. And you have to build them and then put it all into space.
Cost per square foot of land is not that high basically anywhere you could build a datacentre to offset that.
I agree those don't seem immediately to be huge wins to me; not dealing with local politics might be a big one, though. Depending on location. There's a lot of red tape in the world.
He also had more information about self-driving progress than any other person in the world - yet he was wrong with his predictions every year for last 10 years.
Don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
The whole thing makes no sense. What's the advantage of putting AI compute in space? What's even one advantage? There are none. Cooling is harder. Power is harder. Radiation is worse. Maintenance is impossible.
The only reason you'd ever put anything in orbit, aside from rare cases where you need zero-gee, is because you need it to be high up for some reason. Maybe you need it to be above the atmosphere (telescopes), or maybe you need a wide view of the earth (communications satellites), but it's all about the position, and you put up with a lot of downsides for it.
I feel like either I'm taking crazy pills, or all these people talking about AI in space are taking crazy pills. And I don't think it's me.
It might be possible to scam the Pentagon with some talk about AI and killer satellites that take down ICBMs.
A million tons will cost $1500x1000x1000000= 1,500,000,000,000. That is one and a half TRILLION dollars per year. That is only the lift costs, it does not take into account the cost of manufacturing the actual space data centers. Who is going to pay this?
We're getting close to having the time for Starship's delays to be the same as the actual time for the Saturn 5 to go from plans to manned launches (Jan 1962-Dec 1968).
One is obviously true, and the other is very likely false.
Did the Cybertruck "never work"? Obviously not, they're on the streets. Was it a <$40k truck with >250mi range? No.
Did FSD "never work"? Obviously not, tons of people drive many, many miles without touching the wheel. Does Tesla feel confident in it enough to not require safety operators to follow it on robotaxi trips? No. Does Tesla trust it enough to operate in the Las Vegas Loop? No. Has Tesla managed to get any state to allow it to operate truly autonomously? No.
Look, I hope Starship does work as advertised. Its cool stuff. But I don't see it as a given that it will. And given by the track record of the guy who promised it, it gives even less confidence. I'm sad there's less competition in this space. We have so many billionaires out there and yet so few out there actually willing push envelopes.
The best case is you meed the unrealistic timeline, the average case outcome is you solve the problem but it is delayed several years. And the worst case is it fails and investors lose some money.
If you try to hire people but your message is: we want to reduce the cost of access to space by 20% in thirty years, you are going to get approximately zero competent engineers, and a whole lot of coasters.
And no investors, so you'll be dependent on the government anyway. Depending on the government is great until people you do not agree with or are generally anti science, are in power. I assume this part should not need an example nowadays?
Its also a good way to shred morale and investor confidence when you're a decade past your timelines or continue to fail on actually delivering on past promises.
Let’s say the costs in 5 years do get as low as $15 per kilogram or about 2 orders of magnitude improvement in launch prices. That means a 200-ton payload Starship would cost $3,000 to launch.
Do you honestly believe that? The world’s largest rocket cost a total of $3,000 to launch?
You have missed three zeroes in this calculation ;)
15 per kg for a 200-ton payload is about 3 million$. That seems achievable, given that propellant costs are about 1-1.5 million.
Obviously the solar and cooling for the above would both weigh and cost a ton but... It's feels surprisingly close to being within an order of magnitude of current costs when you ballpark it?
Like i don't think it's actually viable, it's just a little shocking that the idea isn't as far out of line as i expected.
The craziest part of those statements is "100 kW per ton." IDK what math he is doing there or future assumptions, but today we can't even sniff at 10 kW per ton. iROSA [1] on the ISS is about 0.150 kW per ton.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_Out_Solar_Array
edit: iROSA = 33 kW per ton, thanks friends
Land and permitting. I’m not saying the math works. Just that there are envelopes for it to.
The US mandates by law that we grow a fuck ton of corn to mix 10% ethanol into gasoline.
If you replaced just those cornfields with solar/wind, they would power the entire USA and a 100% electric vehicle fleet. That includes the fact that they are in the corn belt with less than ideal sun conditions.
We aren’t even talking about any farmland that produces actual food or necessary goods, just ethanol as a farm subsidy program.
The US is already horrendously bad at land use. There’s plenty of land. There’s plenty of ability to build more grid capacity.
The panels suffer radiation damage they don't suffer on Earth. If this is e.g. the same altitude orbits as Starlink, then the satellites they're attached to burn up after around tenth of their ground-rated lifetimes. If they're a little higher, then they're in the Van Allen belts and have a much higher radiation dose. If they're a lot higher, the energy cost to launch is way more.
If you could build any of this on the moon, that would be great; right now, I've heard of no detailed plans to do more with moon rock than use it as aggregate for something else, which means everyone is about as far from making either a PV or compute factory out of moon rock as the residents of North Sentinel Island are.
OK, perhaps that's a little unfair, we do actually know what the moon is made of and they don't, but it's a really big research project just to figure out how to make anything there right now, let alone making a factory that could make them cost-competitive with launching from Earth despite the huge cost of launching from Earth.
1. solar is very efficient at generating energy, no moving parts, simple physics etc.
2. in space you don't deal with weather or daylight cycle, you can just point your panels at the sun and generate very stable energy, no batteries required
3. environmental factors are simpler, no earthquakes, security, weather. Main problem here is radiation
In theory its a very elegant way to convert energy to compute.
Satellites are heavily reliant on either batteries or being robust to reboots, because they actually do not get stable power - it's much more dynamic (just more predictable too since no weather).
According to this other source https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2026/02/02/space...
the filing mentions this
> these satellites would operate between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and Sun-Synchronous Orbit inclinations (SSO)
You’ve spent too much life force trying to even understand the liar’s fake logic.
Let’s start right here: there is no such thing as becoming power/grid constrained on earth. If you replaced just the cornfields that the United States uses just to grow corn for ethanol in gasoline just in the corn belt, you could power the entire country with solar+batteries+wind. Easily, and cheaply.
If you don’t even believe that solar+batteries are cheap (they are), fine, choose your choice of power plant. Nuclear works fine.
The truth is, xAI combining with SpaceX is almost certainly corrupt financial engineering. SpaceX as a government contractor and that means Elon’s pal Trump can now siphon money into xAI via the federal government.
Company website:
https://rdw.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/redwire-roll-out-...
And their Opal configuration beats the metric: 5.3 kW for 42.7 kg.
Don't assume this. Why would you assume this?
So, let's accept that Musk's concern of evil runaway AI is a real problem. In that case, is there anything more concerning than a distributed solar powered orbital platform for AI inference?
Elon Musk appears to be his own nemesis.
Agreed, when I wrote "just unplug it," this counterargument was present in my mind, but nobody likes a wall of text.
However, my original point was that a distributed solar powered orbital inference platform is even worse! Think about how hard it would be to practically take out Starlink... it's really hard.
Now.. >1M nodes of a neural net in the sky? Why would someone who lives as a god, the richest man in the world, the only person capable of doing this thanks to his control of SpaceX... do the literal worst thing possible?
1. China is very concerned about Starlink-like constellations. They want their own, but mostly they want to be able to destroy competitors. That is really hard.
2. Many countries have single ASAT capabilities. Where one projectile can hit one satellite. However, this is basically shoot a bullet, with a bullet, on different trajectories.
3. > Sure, it'd take orbital launch capabilities to lift ... how many bags of metal scrap and explosives?
If I understand orbital mechanics... those clouds of chaff would need to oppose the same orbit, otherwise it is a gentle approach. In the non-aligned orbit, it's another bullet hitting a bullet scenarios as in 2, but with a birdshot shotgun.
My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD, as far as mass to orbit, all at once! If you blow up some group of Starlink, that chaff cloud will just keep in orbit on the same axis. It will not keep blowing up other Starlinks.
The gentle grenade approach was possibly tested by the CCP here:
Thanks for the clarification, I guess that explains this (from you):
> Think about how hard it would be to practically take out Starlink.
and this:
> My entire point is that constellations in GEO
which you've now corrected.
Moving on:
> My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD
So let's not do that .. how hard is it to render the entire LEO zone a shit show with contra wise clouds of frag that cause cascading failures?
Forget the geopolitics of China et al. .. LEO launch capabilities are spreading about the globe, it's not just major world powers that pose a threat here.
Just to get on the same page here. My arugument is that prior to Elon Musk, the only human capable of launching >1M distributed solar powered inference nodes, if one accepts runaway AGI/ASI as a threat...prior to that we had a few hundred AI inference mega-data centers. Most of them had easily disrupted power supplies by one dude with a Sawzall.
Now, we are moving to a paradigm were the power supply is the sun, the orbit gives the power 24/7, and the dude with the Sawzall needs to buy 1000x the Sawzalls, and also give them orbital velocity.
Can we not agree that this is a much more difficult problem to "just unplug it," than it was when the potentially troublesome inference was terrestrial?
This ish is starting to get really serious.
One of the biggest but most pointless questions I have about our current moment in history is whether the people in power actually believe the stuff they say or are lying. Ultimately I don't think the answer really matters, their actions are their actions, but there is just so much that is said by people like Musk that strains credulity to the point that it indicates either they're total idiots or they think the rest of us are total idiots and I'm genuinely curious which of those is more true.
It is already more expensive to performance maintenance on SOCs than it is to replace them. Remember, these machines are not for serving a database, there are practically no storage needs (and storage is the component that fails most often.)
Given that, the main challenge is cooling, I assume that will be figured out before yeeting 100 billion $ of computers into space. Plenty of smart people work at these companies.
> The basic math is that launching a 100,000 tons per year of satellites generating 10 kW of compute power per ton would add 1 gigawatt of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 0.01 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 20 to 30 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
It’s completely delusional to think you could operate a data centre in a void with nowhere to put the heat.
Naysayers probably get fired fast.
They’d need incredible leaps in efficiency for an orbiting ton collecting and performing 100 KW of compute.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...
Planned lifespan of Starlink satellites is 5years.
Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [insert next vibe shift]
At what point do people start to see the ever-shifting goalposts for what they are?
Datacenters in orbit seem insane so idk we’ll see
There's a lot of doubt that the AI and compute to enable that would happen on commercially relevant timescales.
Consider: "do the majority of work" is a strict superset of "get into car and drive it". The power envelope available for an android is much smaller than a car, and the recently observed rate of improvements for compute hardware efficiency says this will take 16-18 years to bridge that gap; that plus algorithmic efficiency improvements still requires a decade between "car that can drive itself" and "android that can drive a car". (For any given standard of driving).
And that's a decade gap even if it only had to do drive a car and no other labour.
You can't get around this (for an economy-wide significant number of androids) by moving the compute to a box plugged into the mains, for the same reason everyone's current getting upset about the effect of data centres on their electricity bills.
And note that I'm talking about a gap between them, not a time from today. Tesla's car-driving AI still has safety drivers/the owner in the driving seat, it is not a level 4 system. For all that there are anecdotes about certain routes and locations where it works well, there's a lot of others where it fails.
That said: Remote control units without much AI are still economically useful, e.g. a factory in Texas is staffed entirely by robots operated over a Starlink connection by a much cheaper team in Nairobi.
This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.
You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
Radiators in space are extremely inefficient because there's no conduction.
Also you have huge heat inputs from the sun. So you need substantial cooling before you get around to actually cooling the GPUs.
Space is not empty. Satellites have to be boosted all the time because of drag. Massive panels would only worsen that. Once you boosters are empty the satellite is toast.
On Low Earth Orbits (LEOs), sure, but the traces of atmosphere that cause the drag disappear quite fast with increasing altitude. At 1000 km, you will stay up for decades.
Building this is definitely not trivial and not easy to make arbitrarily large.
I am highly skeptical about data centers in space, but radiators don't need to be unshaded. In fact, they benefit from the shade. This is also being done on the ISS.
The JWST operates at 2kw max. That's not enough for a single H200.
AI datacenters in space are a non-starter. Anyone arguing otherwise doesn't understand basic thermodynamics.
The whole concept is still insane though, fwiw.
On Earth, you can vent the heat into the atmosphere no problem, but in space, there's no atmosphere to vent to, so dissipating heat becomes a very, very difficult problem to solve. You can use radiators to an extent, but again, because no atmosphere, they're orders of magnitude less effective in space. So any kind of cooling array would have to be huge, and you'd also have to find some way to shade them, because you still have to deal with heat and other kinds of radiation coming from the Sun.
It's easier to just keep them on Earth.
The ISS power/heat budget is like 240,000 BTU/hr. That’s equivalent to half of an Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack. So two international space stations per rack. Or about 160,000 international space stations to cool the 10GW “Stargate” datacenter that OpenAI’s building in Abilene. There are 10,000 starlink satellites.
Starship could probably carry 250-300 of the new V2 Mini satellites which are supposed to have a power/heat budget of like 8kW. That's how I got 5,000 Starship launches to match OpenAI’s datacenter.
Weight seems less of an issue than size. 83,000 NVL72’s would weigh 270 million lbs or 20% of the lift capacity of 5000 starship launches. Leaving 80% for the rest of the satellite mass, which seems perhaps reasonable.
Elon's napkin math is definitely off though, by over an order of magnitude. "a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton" The NVL72's use 74kW per ton. But that's just the compute, without including the rest of the fucking satellite (solar panels and radiators). So that estimate is complete garbage.
One note: If you could afford to send up one of your own personal satellites, it would be extremely difficult for the FBI to raid.
That's equivalent to a couple datacenter GPUs.
> You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
Finding space in space is the least difficult problem. Getting it up there is not easy.
This is one of those things that's not obvious till you think about it.
There are commercial systems that can use open loop cooling (i.e. spray water) to improve efficiency of the panel by keeping the panel at a optimal temp of ~25C and the more expensive closed loop systems with active cooling recovers additional energy from the heat by circulating water like a solar heater in the panel back.
https://www.spectrolab.com/company.html
Twenty-five years after the ISS began operations in low Earth orbit, a new generation of advanced solar cells from Spectrolab, twice as efficient as their predecessors, are supplementing the existing arrays to allow the ISS to continue to operate to 2030 and beyond. Eight new arrays, known as iROSAs (ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays) are being installed on the ISS in orbit.
The new arrays use multi-junction compound semiconductor solar cells from Spectrolab. These cells cost something like 500 times as much per watt as modern silicon solar cells, and they only produce about 50% more power per unit area. On top of that, the materials that Spectrolab cells are made of are inherently rare. Anyone talking about scaling solar to terawatts has to rely on silicon or maybe perovskite materials (but those are still experimental).
This is so obvious, but it's so stupid and at this scale that people find it hard to believe.
radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.
Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.
I don't think dissipating heat would be an issue at all. The cost of launch I think is the main bottleneck, but cooling would just be a small overhead on the cost of energy. Not a fundamental problem.
I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/12/31/elon-musks-x-fidelity-valua...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/02/elon-musk-spacex-xai-ipo...
Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.
It was easy to support SpaceX, despite the racist/sexist/authoritarian views of its owner, because he kept that nonsense out of the conversation.
X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.
Now that these are the same company, there's no separation. SpaceX is part of Musk's political mission now. No matter how cool the tech, I cannot morally support this company, and I hope, for the sake of society, it fails.
This announcement, right after the reveal that Elon Musk reached out to Jeffrey Epstein and tried to book a trip to Little St. James so that he could party with "girls", really doesn't bode well.
It's a shame you can't vote these people out, because I loved places like Twitter, and businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, but Elon Musk is a fascist who uses his power and influence to attack some of the most important pillars of our society.
1) new technology improves vacuum heat radiation efficiency
2) new technology reduces waste heat generation from compute
All the takes I've seen have been focused on #1, but I'm starting to wonder about #2... Specifically spintronics and photonic chips.
In all the conversations I've seen play out on hacker news about compute in space, what comes up every time is "it's unviable because cooling is so inefficient".
Which got me thinking, what if cooling needs dropped by orders of magnitude? Then I learned about photonic chips and spintronics.
This is an extremely stupid idea, but because of our shared delusion of capitalism and the idea that wealth accumulation at the top should be effectively limitless, this guy gets to screw around and divert actual human labor towards insane and useless projects like this rather than solving real world problems.
And Musk keeps grifting about Kardashev 2 civilizations while his rockets do not even reach the moon.
If SpaceX goes public, that will rescue his xAi shares. I wonder how he will rescue his Tesla shares.
SpaceX and xAI would not be able to freely collaborate on space datacenters after the IPO because it would be self-dealing. SpaceX likes to be vertically integrated, so they wouldn't want to just be a contractor for OpenAI's or Anthropic's infrastructure. Merging before the IPO is the only way that SpaceX could remain vertically integrated as they build space datacenters.
Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
This current announcement seems silly, though.
Once again pointing out Tesla has around 300 robotaxis running in 2 cities (Austin/SF).
The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .
As soon as something kinda elegant and charged with hope as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window
If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco the world would come to a screeching halt.
Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible
Can we evaluate based on the stated goals, or why does the criteria keep shifting?
https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...
> “Or did he just have an idea and blurt it out," I asked Vance. > "I'm 99.9-percent sure it's the latter," Vance tells me.
Also that to scapegoat Musk for killing the California train when California was perfectly able to kill it itself:
> Vance then brought up a valid point: "In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail, there's still almost none that's built....
Light rail, generally refers to urban rail, "trams".
Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.
I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.
>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.
>PayPal
Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.
>Tesla
Investor, not founder.
>SpaceX
Yup, props here.
>Grok/xAI
Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.
The New Deal happened with massive popular support because people did not like the Barons, and wanted to stop them and actually have a life worth living.
It only took like 30 years of suffering.
The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.
Twitter (X) owed $1.3B in debt every year in interest since Musk's takeover. This was before re-financing in a higher interest rate environment. The company was losing $200MM+ per year on ~$5B in revenue before the takeover, and there are reports that revenues have decreased by round 50%.
Best case scenario if we accept those numbers is that X makes $3B per year and about half of that goes immediately out the door in debt payments before paying a cent for the entire business to function.
However, if SpaceX acquires X, that ~$1.5B in interest is a fraction of the $8B In profits SpaceX is allegedly generating annually. Further, they can restructure the debt if it's SpaceX's debt, and not owned by X. Investors will be more likely to accept SpaceX shares as collateral than X.
X made a profit last year because they cut costs lower than the drop in ad revenue (which is also slowly recovering). The big question is if they will still be profitable in 2026 year without the US election driving big traffic numbers and ads.
You don't have to think they have the best models of course, but they are clearly a very significant, and some might argue, leading player in the AI race.
So no, I wouldn’t say Elon is a major player in the AI space. People use his models because they are cheap and are willing to undress people’s photos.
What is this argument exactly? What are they leading?
That's the full stack? Only other player that vertically setup is facebook, google and microsoft.
We also know the Twitter buyout debt was sold at near par before the merger with xAI which is inconsistent with being near bankruptcy.
My understanding is that it was not oversubscribed and would not have closed without Tesla’s investment.
Let’s not forget, xAI is the parent of Twitter/X (the social network). So now, taxpayers are paying to keep Twitter/X alive. After all, it is taxpayer money going to the contracts the government gives SpaceX for launches. Nice way to subsidize what is effectively a one sided campaign machine for the GOP and far right.
I think that is also likely, unless Tesla can stage a major turnaround, it is going to be beaten by Chinese competitors nearly everywhere that they are allowed (which is everywhere but the USA.)
Twitter/X in xAI
SolarCity into Tesla
xAI into SpaceC
I am just waiting now for Tesla to be acquired by SpaceC as it has run into issues.
It is all very puzzling to me.
Not sure how X which “merged” wit X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX really matter or synergize but here we are. It’s all about the money being protected. And this Ketamine using wierdo is gonna be the worlds first trillionaire. Yay all of us.
Musk aide while high: "sPaCe"
Slightly less high Musk aide: "But what is the synergy, where's the moat and how could that be done in practice and most importantly is there any limiting factor on Earth before we have to bring AI into.."
Musk : "SPACE!!!!!!"
It is incredible to think that the extremes of the stock market are actually pretty similar, pink sheets/cryptos and these mega companies are actually the same. News fueled pumps and dumps to win the cycle of hype of the week
Tesla has probably the most valuable shareholders on Earth. Over years of empty promises and meme status, the stock has pretty much purged all the level heads. So it's mostly deluded Elon sycophants giving placing their tithe on the alter of his sci-fi fantasy smoke and mirrors game.
In reality he will be dumping the debt of twitter and xAI (and maybe spacex?) on Tesla shareholders, and buoying that with the added layer of hyper that spaceX brings.
But seriously, I think legally satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country they were launched from.
Or he could just buy a small island in the Carribean. There's one in particular that is available.
Maybe if Elon launched himself and the dev team into orbit and didn't use any ground stations and just Starlink terminals he could start getting into legal loopholes.
I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...
The X and xAI doomsters are in complete shambles in an absolute failed prediction of the collapse of the November 2022 acquisition of Twitter.
Instead it is now part of SpaceX, still running with well over 240M+ daily actives and 500M+ MAUs.
Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem? As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.
I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like
Energy Generation Practicality
Building satellite datacenters powered by solar energy in space is conceptually feasible, as solar insolation in orbit is about 1,366 W/m²—roughly 35% higher than on Earth's surface due to no atmospheric filtering or day-night cycles in geostationary or sun-synchronous orbits. Advanced solar panels in space can achieve efficiencies of 25-35%, yielding 340-480 W/m² of electrical power. For context, a typical terrestrial datacenter rack consumes 8-15 kW, but AI/high-performance computing (HPC) racks can reach 30-80 kW. Scaling to a hypothetical 1 MW datacenter (enough for ~12-30 AI racks) would require approximately 2,000-3,000 m² of solar panels, assuming 25% efficiency and some losses.
However, practicality hinges on mass and deployment. Thin-film solar arrays (e.g., from projects like Caltech's Space Solar Power Project) can weigh as little as 0.5-1 kg/m², making the array for 1 MW ~1-3 tons. This is manageable for a constellation, but integrating with compute hardware adds complexity. Concepts like Google's Project Suncatcher and Thales Alenia Space's ASCEND study propose modular satellites with integrated solar power, potentially achieving 10x lower carbon emissions than Earth-based datacenters. Challenges include orbital shading in low Earth orbit (LEO) and panel degradation from radiation/micro-meteoroids, but overall, generating sufficient energy is practical with current tech if scaled modestly (e.g., 100-500 kW per satellite).
Heat Radiation Practicality
Heat dissipation in space relies solely on thermal radiation, as there's no atmosphere for convection or conduction to a medium. This is highly practical because space acts as an infinite cold sink (~3 K background temperature). Waste heat from datacenter compute (typically 80-90% of input power) can be radiated via large, lightweight panels with high emissivity coatings (ε ≈ 0.9).
Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for blackbody radiation (P = εσA(T⁴ - T_sink⁴), where σ = 5.67 × 10⁻⁸ W/m²K⁴), a radiator at 50°C (323 K) emits ~550-620 W/m² (one-sided). For a 1 MW heat load, you'd need ~1,600-1,800 m² of radiator area—comparable to solar panel sizing and feasible with deployable structures like those on the ISS (which radiate up to 350 W/m²). Designs from Laird Technologies and NEC emphasize distributed radiation at the PCB level, using materials like aluminum or composites for efficient emission while minimizing solar absorption.
The main limitation is surface area: satellites must balance radiator size with stability and drag in LEO. Overheating risks exist during eclipses or high-load bursts, but passive systems (e.g., heat pipes) and active louvers make this solvable. Studies like ASCEND confirm space datacenters could reject heat more efficiently than Earth-based ones, avoiding water-intensive cooling.
Shielding from Cosmic Rays in LEO
In LEO (400-2,000 km), Earth's magnetic field deflects much of the high-energy radiation, resulting in dose rates of 100-10,000 rad(Si)/year—far lower than in higher orbits. This makes shielding practical and often minimal for short missions (1-5 years). Primary threats are total ionizing dose (TID) causing degradation and single-event effects (SEE) like bit flips or latch-ups.
Standard aluminum shielding (3-5 mm thick, ~1-2 g/cm² areal density) reduces TID to <10 krad(Si) over 3 years, sufficient for 65-130 nm chips. Polymers like polyethylene or borated polyethylene outperform aluminum by 20-70% in proton shielding, reducing displacement damage. Many LEO cubesats use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics with redundancy (e.g., multiple computers) and error-correcting code, avoiding heavy rad-hard parts that add mass/cost.
For datacenters, radiation-tolerant designs (e.g., from Melagen Labs' low-density composites) can extend COTS lifespan 3-5x. No exotic shielding is required—Earth's magnetosphere provides natural protection, and simulations (e.g., MCNP/OMERE) confirm viability. Drawbacks include occasional upsets during solar flares, but overall, LEO shielding is straightforward and cost-effective.
Launch Costs for Practical Mass and Competitive Compute
Launch costs are the biggest barrier. Current prices to LEO are ~$2,700/kg (Falcon 9) to ~$1,500/kg (Falcon Heavy). For a "useful" compute level—say, 1 petaFLOP/s (comparable to a small AI cluster)—hardware might mass 1-5 tons (based on dense racks like NVIDIA DGX at ~100-200 kg/rack, plus power/thermal systems). Including solar panels and radiators, a single satellite could total 5-10 tons.
At $1,500/kg, launching one unit costs $7.5-15 million—potentially competitive with terrestrial datacenter energy costs ($0.05-0.15/kWh over lifetime), but scaling to a constellation (10-100 satellites for global coverage) pushes totals to $75-1,500 million. Google's analysis requires costs <$200/kg by the mid-2030s for parity; Starship aims for $10-100/kg, dropping per-satellite costs to <$1-2 million.
Competitiveness: Terrestrial datacenters cost ~$10-20 million/MW to build/operate annually, but space avoids land/water constraints. At current costs, space is impractical for mass deployment; with Starship, it could undercut Earth prices by 10-50x in energy efficiency. Thales estimates needing 10x less emissive launchers for net-zero viability.
Overall, the concept is technically practical today for prototypes (e.g., via Starcloud or SpaceX proposals), but economically viable only with launch costs dropping 10-20x. Energy and heat are strengths; shielding is low-risk in LEO. Full constellations could emerge by 2030 if reusability scales.
Knowing the insane level of hardening that goes into putting microcontrollers into space, how to the expect to use some 3nm process chip to stand a chance?
Starship launches are only going to make sense every 779.94 days (the approx 2 year Mars-Earth proximity). The rest of the time, the launches could similarly be used to deploy orbiting data centers for XAi/Grok etc. Brilliant move.
This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are.
No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips.
(Although now it got me thinking, do random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.
The man's a moron.
Anyone who doesn't see how broken this situation is isn't paying attention. This is how people like Elon, who want to seize as much power from the government as they can, ensure that the means for seizing that power are untouchable.
Anyone who has ever used Grok or X lately knows that both of these products are heavily manipulated to align with the political, social, and economic views of Elon Musk, who is increasingly boosting "white power" language and full-throatedly backing America's most nationalistic and authoritarian president to date.
This is just another consolidation of power, and it's deeply worrisome. Any integrity one may have hoped remained at SpaceX just vanished when they aligned their mission with that of these deeply problematic digital services.
And this is not even scratching the surface of what looks like a deliberate attempt to create Kessler syndrome by launching millions of cheap short-term satellites into orbit, or the rationality of putting datacenters into orbit in the first place...
They can sell xAI/Grok to all automobile companies along with Tesla and other businesses(X.com included) just like the SpaceX services.
It would good to see how it was valued.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
Why?
Is financial fraud consistent with our national prestige?
There are better companies.
But, Isaacman is administrator now, and whatever you think about Isaacman and his relationship to SpaceX, I don't think there's much merit in thinking one of Duffy's half thought out plans is likely to be carried out.
Any claims that this is about putting compute in space is just a non-sense distraction. This was absolutely about bailing Elon out of his impulsive, drug-fueled Twitter purchase.
The only question now is: when they try to go public, will they be punished for wasting so much money or not? My guess is: not.
I expect the next step in this series of moves is to turn Tesla into a SPAC & have it acquire SpaceX, bringing its valuation nearer that 8.5t.
I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi
Are we ready for that as a modern society or are we going to start enacting regulation against it? I'm sorry but people wanting internet everywhere does not justify we going back to the dark ages for a decade or more.
Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries."
"Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers."
Primary and largest investors in X are: Elon Musk, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey.
I don't know that you need to worry about their financial well-being or that they are getting a raw deal.
It is estimated that Starlink is, accounting for 70% - 80% of revenue. Sources: [1] and [2]
NASA is SpaceX's biggest external customer for rocket launch services.
Although NASA is SpaceX’s largest external customer for traditional launch services, the company earns far more revenue from Starlink customers (millions of subscribers). So overall Starlink itself is SpaceX’s biggest revenue generator and de facto largest customer segment.
[1] https://pestel-analysis.com/blogs/target-market/spacex
[2] https://londoneconomics.co.uk/blog/publication/crouching-riv...
Please highlight the problems you have with how it pertains to this context, how the biggest customer is harmed.
What do you care if its private owners are willing to absorb the mess that is xAI?
> so are the banks?
Which relevant bank do you have in mind that is not a public company (listed on a stock exchange)?
None of this has anything to do with business or innovation. Do you not immediately see that? Most of my friends reaction to this news was that this is so obvious it's almost funny (or actually it is funny, since most were laughing as they read the headline).
I'm curious how you could not understand the relevance of the quote unless you were aggressively trying to not understanding it.
One of the dumbest things I've ever read.
We saw this on a much smalelr scale a decade ago when one of Elon's companies (Tesla) acquired a second one of Elon's companies (SolarCity) because it was broke and owed a ton of money to a third one of Elon's companies (SpaceX).
Elon was forced to go through with his impulsive Twitter acquisition by a Delaware court, an acquisition that was not only secured by a bunch of Tesla stock but also a bunch of Qatari and Saudi royal money. He then mismanaged Twitter so badly Fidelity wrote down its value by at least 80% [1].
So what did Elon do? Raised even more questionable foreign money into xAI, diverted GPUs intended for another of his companies (Tesla) into Twitter and then "merged" Twitter into xAI, effectively using other people's money to bail him out from an inevitable margin call on his Tesla stock.
Interestingly, Twitter was reportedly valued at $33 billion in this deal [2], significantly more than the less than $10 billion Fidelity valued Twitter at. Weird, huh? With a competent government, this would be securities fraud that would have you spend the rest of your life in jail. And even with all that, $11 billion was lost on the deal.
So here we are and it's time for the shell game to be played again. Now it's SpaceX's turn to bail out the xAI investors.
And what is the argument for all this? AI data centers in space. Words cannot describe how little sense this makes. Launch costs (even if the Starship launch costs get to their rosy projections), cooling in space, cosmic rays (and the resulting errors) and maintenance. Servers constantly need parts replaced. You can just deorbit the satellite instead but that seems like an expensive way of dealing with a bad SSD or RAM chip.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-acqui...
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.
I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...
But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.
> merge it with a company created out of thin air for 20bil.
> have a third company buy it.
put it back on the market for 1.5 trillion.
And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.
Socialized losses, privatized profits. As is the American way.
1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.
2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.
quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.
Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)
What a joke.
It's just a dumbest idea ever if Elon truly believes it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't.
beklein•2h ago