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."
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.
I have not been following the machinations of X very closely. I don't have the corporate structure of Elon's empire in my head, nor do I have the Meta or Alphabet/Google hierarchies in there. I couldn't have told you about the history of xAI beyond that it exists.
So that's plain ignorance of something you consider common knowledge, but I don't, rather than "aggressively trying to not understand it." And that phrase is particularly grating btw.
However, the way Musk has become less subtle with this tells a story. He got away with these shady financial dealings multiple times so he's now becoming even more brazen and transparent with this behavior. We have gotten to the point in which the spin needed to justify his moves is the physics-defying viability of datacenters in space.
The distortion field will keep growing as long as he keeps getting away with it.
Radiative cooling is the only option, and it basically sucks vs any option you could use on earth.
Second, ai chips have a fixed economic life beyond which you want to replace them with better chips because the cost of running them starts to outpaxe the profit they can generate. This is probably like 2-3 years but the math of doing this in space may be very different. But you can't upgrade space based data centers nearly as easily as a terrestrial data center.
Monet probably wondered how other people couldn't see purple in a haystack.
Essentially means that SpaceX investors are bailing out Elon Musk.
I, by and large, have a strong dislike of Musk to put it mildly. The one thing I will give him, and I think this is his real gift, is he’s absolutely brilliant when it comes to raising capital. He has proven to excel at raising capital, and deploying it well, for extremely capital intensive businesses. I do however wonder if the chickens are coming home to roost because both X and xAI are extremely unprofitable.
I think it’s almost inevitable we will see Space X and Tesla merge. The conditions of that merger will, I believe, say a lot about whether this move was brilliant or batshit.
But regardless, I think quotes like these should have some commentary around them as it helps create a discussion around whatever point they might be trying to make rather than having to make assumptions.
FWIW, SpaceX launched a Tesla roadster into space without first having to merge with Tesla.
Datacenters in space, on the other hand, are a terrible idea because of the laws of physics, which will not get "solved" anytime soon. But don't take it from me, listen to this guy with a PhD in space electronics who worked at NASA and Google;
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
He's all over the Epstein files and his daughter has publicly verified that the timing works out and the emails are probably legitimate.
https://www.threads.com/@vivllainous/post/DUMBh2Vkk8D/im-jus...
Leave SpaceX alone you child. Gwynne has it in excellent hands.. find some other way to pay for your juvenile brainfarts.
1. Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
2. How dare you! You're just jealous!
3. Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
4. Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
5. Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.The backing table is on page 8. Falcon 9 is (was, in 2018! It’s only cheaper now.) at $2700/kg to LEO. No one else is below $4k, except… Falcon Heavy.
There isn’t a single inventor and reusable rockets emerged through decades of research.
But: SpaceX was the first to make orbital-class reuse routine and economically viable.
Soyuz-2 capacity to LEO: 8,600KG
Falcon 9 capacity to LEO: 22,800KG when expended, 17,500KG when not.
Soyuz-2 Cost to Launch: $35 Million
New Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $70 Million
Used Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $50 Million (cost to SpaceX: ~$25 Million)
Soyuz-2 cost per KG: $4000 (data from 2018)
New Falcon 9 cost per KG: $964 when expended, $1250 when not.
Use Falcon 9 coster per KG to Customer: $893 when expended, $690 when not
So realistically, Falcon 9 is roughly 20-30% the price per KG when new, and dropping to a minimum of 17.25% of the price when used.
Plus you get a larger diameter payload fairing and the ability to launch a payload up to 4X the size.
I'm pretty sure that even used as an expendable rocket, 1/4 the price per KG (if you need the capacity) is a pretty significant improvement. Now I understand why satellite ride-shares are so popular!
Soyuz-2: 12 launches
Falcon 9: 165!
And I say that as someone that despises Elon and the way he casts his companies as due to his personal technical genius.
Not true. What about STS?
such a hilarious comment / mindset. he made the best selling car in the world 3 years running. neuralink is a great breakthrough. there are a string of accomplishments which individually would be the greatest thing many many people have ever done.
Not only did Elon not found Tesla[0], but many employees have described the "babysitters" or "handlers" who are responsible for making him feel like his ideas have been implemented, so that his caprice and bluster don't interfere with the actual operation of the company.
To give him his due, he's a phenomenal manipulator of public opinion and image, and he certainly has invested a lot of his emerald-generated wealth into numerous successful ventures - but he himself is not a positive contributor to their success.
[0] https://autoworldjournal.com/is-elon-musk-the-founder-of-tes...
I feel that a lot of people simply don't like Elon because of political reasons which are often also based on misinformed opinions. It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.
Now I think ultimately any ultra wealthy person is going to have some flaws that people can find and latch onto in order to hate someone.
Sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee8001 https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
Just say "rocket man bad" and save some keystrokes.
Hey Jeff, on what day is the wildest party on your island?
I agree we'll have to keep digging (or reading other comments, at least) to find a better explanation.
It seems like a lot of people are very biased on this topic and want to see this fail because of who the company is. This author of this piece you linked appears to be both anti-AI and anti-Elon for example.
We also are unaware if there is some bigger strategy at play here and a bigger vision then what is currently being shared. I like to see companies try to innovate and take risks. I would like to try and be optimistic about things.
I think it does, for what it’s worth if we are to extend intelligence (as we know it) and potentially consciousness out there into the galaxy.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
Orbit is a very inconvenient environment. It's difficult to reach so maintenance is a nightmare, it's moving all the time, there's nowhere to sink waste heat into, you have a constrained power budget, you have a constrained weight budget. The only things you want to put in orbit are things that absolutely can't go anywhere else.
Heat has nowhere to go in space. Read about how much engineering went into cooling the ISS and now multiply that by billions.
Physics, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than this and it turns out vacuum is an incredibly good insulator and more (much more) than offsets the temperature differential in terms of how easy it is to cool something.
It's baffling that the market has stayed so irrational because of Musk. It will collapse because of him.
Obviously there's a pattern of financial engineering, and it's inefficient, but the winners do offset the losers so there won't be a total collapse.
When it all goes bankrupt, they can pay off the bonds for x¢ in the dollar and own SpaceX.
Perhaps if the gov could organize a little better, they'd make sure SpaceX owed lots of taxes and put themselves in front of the queue for ownership and screw other creditors (especially foreign).
Edit: looks like the US military doesn't spend that much on SpaceX: https://londoneconomics.co.uk/blog/publication/crouching-riv...
For example, I think the car market had become pretty stagnant with traditional car makers, and most electric cars they attempted to make sucked. Tesla making good desirable electric cars really pushed EV's into becoming more popular and having a better charging network. I think it would have taken much longer for EV's to start growing in popularity if someone wasn't willing to take a risk.
Are they going to be too early to the market for this kind of tech? Maybe. Is it going to end up being a waste of money? Yeah it totally could be. But at the end of the day I do like to see some risks being taken like this and it sucks seeing constant negativity whenever companies try something new.
Or they could just go with the competition. If it came down to propping up something, I don’t see much difference between propping up ULA, Blue Origin or SpaceX. In the current environment who gets propped up probably depends on who scratches Donalds back.
He sold FSD for 12 years, now is going to sell a Dyson Sphere for the next 30. This guy makes Ponzi look like a street hustler.
the article headline immediately screams "financial gymnastics" to me so the rest followed from the quote.
Starlink is also a company under SpaceX. Would you argue that is also financial gymnastics? Is it much different from what Starlink does? Instead of launching satellites to be a world wide ISP, they are launching them to be an AI provider.
I just don't see how this compares to the quote, otherwise it would apply to so many companies, including other ones already under SpaceX.
To me this just doesn't seem related and seems like a pretty big stretch likely biased by people who dislike AI and Elon.
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.
But given the current administration, I don't have a lot of faith in the government looking out for anyone else's interests here.
Have they complained?
That seems like misplaced concerned for an investor class that really aren’t suffering.
Culture exists, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey#Twitter
Still, don't make the mistake I did, which was to read the above comment to mean "he put more money in at the time of the buyout", since he was called an "investor in X".
This is speculative, of course, but yeah seems likely.
SpaceX is planning the largest IPO in history aiming for over a trillion dollars in market cap
Step 2: IPO SpaceX
Step 3: Merge Tesla and SpaceX x xAI (which would have been tricky if they were still private).
> so are the banks?
Which relevant bank do you have in mind that is not a public company (listed on a stock exchange)?
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...
NASA contracts alone have exceeded $13 billion since 2015, with $1.1 billion expected for 2025.
The U.S. Space Force awarded $845 million for 2025 and $733 million for 2024.
Commercial satellite operators are estimated to contribute between $2.5 billion and $3 billion in 2025.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?
- Other competitors exit because they're not attractive to NASA.
- Dickhead owner makes the company buy the blackhole of money that is Twitter.
- Goes to NASA, "We're bleeding money, we need millions more or that launch scheduled in 6 months is going to be cancelled..."
- NASA, etc, is forced to shovel money into the Nazi bar/child porn generator because they don't have an alternative...
* https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
* "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
* "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."
* "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap."
* "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper]
* "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth."
* "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"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.
The idea itself may be sound, though that's unrelated to the question of whether Elon Musk can be relied on to be honest with investors about what their real failure projections and cost estimates are and whether it actually makes financial sense to do this now or in the near future.
I can't get in detail about real numbers but it's not doable with current hardware by a large margin.
Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.
AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.
I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.
Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)
Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea.
Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
But I think there's solutions to the waste heat issue
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineer...
Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but as of right now humanity seems to have an insatiable demand for power.
Full paragraph quote comes from:
> While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. 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. >
In the meantime, how about affordable insulin for everybody?
building them on earth and then shipping them up?
We’re not exactly at a loss for land over here.
In situ manufacturing. You just have to send enough to build the thing that builds the factory.
The moon mfg makes significantly more sense than the hilarious plan to establish a permanent Mars base in the next 50 years, but that's not saying much.
From lunar regolith you would extract: oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, silicon, calcium, and magnesium.
From the poles you can get fuel (water ice -> water + hydrogen + oxygen).
The real constraint is not materials, but rather power generation, automation reliability, and initial capital investment.
So you have to shuttle machines, energy systems, and electronics.
The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure.
Satellites that would benefit most are: huge comms platforms, space-based power satellites, large radar arrays, deep-space telescopes, etc.
Do we actually know how to do that?
>From the poles
From the poles! So the proposal includes building a planetary-scale railway network on bumpy lunar terrain.
>The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure.
None of those are things we are hurting for down here, though.
Well, what happens over the course of a year of night and clouds is that 1 TW-peak becomes an average of about 110 to 160 GW.
We're making ~1 TW-peak per year of PV right now.
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?
Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, 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 "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.
When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.
But yeah, I didn't include that delivering all that stuff by truck (including all the personnel) to a terrestrial PV site isn't free either.
Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
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/ )
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.
It is similar to the biological tradeoff of having a few offspring and investing heavily in their safety and growth vs having thousands off offspring and investing nothing in their safety and growth.
>just use even more solar panels
Humanity has a finite (and too small) capacity for building solar panels. AI requires lots of power already. So the question is, do you want AI to consume X (where X is a pretty big chunk of the pie), or five times X, from that total supply?
Using less PV is great, but only if the total cost ends up cheaper than installing 5X the capacity as terrestrial PV farms, along with daily smoothing batteries.
SpaceX is only skating to where they predict the cost puck will be.
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 :\
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.
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.
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"?
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.
We can make ten or hundred times the number of solar cells we make right now, we just don't have a reason to. The technology is fairly ancient unless you want to compete on efficiency, and the raw materials abundant.
>We can make ten or hundred times the number of solar cells we make right now
The limit isn't just about the current capacity or the maximum theoretical capacity, it's also about the maximum speed you can ramp.
Eventually :)
Markets are forward looking, and not really bound to 'tomorrow'.
Not just for startups either. If you ramp up the Polio vaccine in 1 year vs 10 years, that has a big impact on human wellbeing. The two scenarios are not equivalent outcomes, even though it still happens "eventually."
Speed matters.
Developing new technology happens to matter more.
I'm sure investors are going to do their own analysis on this and reach their own conclusions, you should try betting against it.
To be fair, he later added this:
>in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial".[13] In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one.
Sources are in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Also, he literally said it was a joke, and was miffed that he was best know for something he didn't take seriously.
> What do you think the limiting factor is?
You need to be able to harness enough raw material and energy to build something that can surround the sun. That does not exist in the solar system and we do not yet have the means to travel further out to collect, move, and construct such an incredibly huge structure. It seems like a fantasy.
You don't build a rigid shell of course, you build a swarm of free-floating satellites in a range of orbits.
See https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH for numbers.
Do tell.
The manufacturing scale comes from designing factory factories. They aren't that far in the future. Most factory machinery is made in factories which could be entirely automated, so you just need some robots to install machines into factories.
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.
The Earth's crust has an average thickness of about 15-20 km. Practically we can only get at maybe the top 1-2 km, as drill bits start to fail the deeper you go.
The Earth's radius is 6,371 km.
So even if we could somehow dug up entire crust we can get to and flung it into orbit, that would barely be noticeable to anything in orbit.
That would suck to do to Earth, but we can launch all of Mars's mass into the swarm.
There is plenty of material in the solar system (see my other response), and plenty of orbits, and launch capability can scale with energy harvested so the launch rate can grow exponentially.
Lots of people will probably decide they don't want any more satellites. But it only takes a few highly determined people to get it done anyway.
That's how that argument sounds like, particularly when you hear it from someone who is as broke as it can be.
It's easy to type those ideas in a comment, or a novel, or a scientific paper ... bring them to reality, oh surprise! that's the hard part.
1: The dumb version to invest
And the robot army being used to do the construction and resource extraction will likely have a much shorter lifespan. So needs to be self-replicating/repairing/recycling.
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...
Even if you discount all the Nazi crap, he's directly responsible for deaths of 600,000+ people, mostly kids, for his illegal destruction of USAID.
What a tremendous failure it is that this guy is still allowed such a prominent place in society.
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.
Edit: okay Tiangong - but that is not a data center.
Silicon is way more forgiving than biology. This isn’t an argument for this proposal. But there is no technical connection between humans in space and data centers other than launch-cost synergies.
I don't see those obstacles appearing though.
We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.
Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?
Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.
For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.
That someone could put a data center in space for the price of 100 years of eliminating world hunger doesn’t mean shit.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
Radiators should work pretty well, and large solar panels can do double duty as radiators.
Also, curiously, newer GPUs are developed to require significantly less cooling than previous generations. Perhaps not so coincidentally?
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
DC-X test flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4
It's awesome that Falcon 9 exists and it is great technology but this guy really isn't the one anyone should want in charge of it.
The guy is saying satellite communication is restricted to 1Gbps ffs. SpaceX is way past that.
I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
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.
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.
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...
That story makes no technical sense. There's no benefit to doing this. Nobody should believe it any more than boots on Mars by 2030.
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.
Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked
So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ...
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.
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
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.
To bring the discussion back on topic: $50k/year or ~$250k over the course of the vehicle's lifetime, instead of $5k for a singular sale event, is why the path for the company is crystal clear. Cybercab is the same kind of step for Tesla as the Model 3 was back in 2017.
Not just that, the cost of each rocket launch is drastically cheaper than all of its competitors costs.
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...
Really? It's one thing to hate Elon Musk, but you're talking about a lot of brilliant engineers who worked on these cars, everything from the components to the software. It's uneeded low blow just because you don't like Elon Musk.
So was GM. Didn’t stop it from going bankrupt.
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
However, the current US administration appears to be actively violating the 1st and 5th in a bunch of ways, the 14th that one time, and making threats to wilfully violate the 2nd for people they don't like and the 22nd to get a third term. It is reasonable, not hyperbolic, to be concerned about Musk's support of this.
If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
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 form of miles to be flown on Boeing planes and miles on Teslas Uber/Taxi/Autonomous taxis instead of dollars
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.
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.
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. :(
I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.
I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.
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...
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.
Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.
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.
> Despite a revenue drop from $5 billion in 2021 to roughly $2.7 billion in 2024, the EBITDA margin surged from 13.6% to 46.3% due to drastic cost-cutting measures and restructuring
You also have to be careful about who said it and what they meant by "profit," because there is gross profit, EBIT, EBITDA, and others.
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.
I wonder if Musk would be willing to let a journalist do a deep dive on all internal communications in the same way he did when he took over twitter.
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.
After that frankly society-destabilizing miracle of inventing competitive photonic processing, your goal of operating data centers in space becomes a tractable economic problem:
Pros:
- You get a continuous 1.37 kW/m^2 instead of an intermittent 1.0 kW/m^2
- Any reasonable spatial volume is essentially zero-cost
Cons:
- Small latency disadvantage
- You have to launch all of your hardware into polar orbit
- On-site servicing becomes another economic problem
So it's totally reasonable to expect the conversation to revolve around cooling, because we know SpaceX can probably direct around $1T into converting methane into delta-V to make the economics work, but the cooling issue is the difference between maybe getting one DC up for that kind of money, or 100 DCs.
If we suddenly lose 2 orders of magnitude of heat produced by our chips, that means we can fit 2 orders of magnitude more compute in the same volume. That is going to be destabilizing in some way, at the very least because you will get the same amount of compute in 1% the data center square footage of today; alternatively, you will get 100-900x the compute in today's data center footprint. That's like going from dial-up to fiber.
China has a land area greater than the USA. (Continental or otherwise.)
Imagine the capillary/friction losses, the force required, and the energy use(!) required to pump ammonia through a football-field sized radiator panel.
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.
You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
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.
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.
EDIT: people continue downvoting and replying with irrelevant retorts, so I'll add in some calculations
Let's assume
1. cheap 18% efficient solar panels (though much better can be achieved with multijunction and quantum-cutting phosphors)
2. simplistic 1360 W/m^2 sunlight orthogonal to the sun
3. an abstract input Area Ain of solar panels (pretend its a square area: Ain = L ^ 2)
4. The amount of heat generated on the solar panels (100%-18%) * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2, the electrical energy being 18% * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2. The electrical energy will ultimately be converted to computational results and heat by the satellite compute. So the radiative cooling (only option in space) must dissipate 100% of the incoming solar energy: the 1360 W / m^2 * Ain.
5. Lets make a pyramid with the square solar panel as a base, with the apex pointing away from the sun, we make sure the surface has high emissivity (roughly 1) in thermal infrared. Observe that such a pyramid has all sides in the shade of the sun. But it is low earth orbit so lets assume warm earth is occupying one hemisphere and we have to put thermal IR reflectors on the 2 pyramid sides facing earth, so the other 2 pyramid sides face actual cold space.
6. The area for a square based symmetric pyramid: we have
6.a. The area of the base Ain = L * L.
6.b. The area of the 4 sides 2 * L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 )
6.c. The area of just 2 sides having output Area Aout = L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 )
7. The 2 radiative sides not seeing the sun and not seeing the earth together have the area in 6.c and must dissipate L ^ 2 * 1360 W / m ^ 2 .
8. Hello Stefan-Boltzmann Law: for emissivity 1 we have the radiant exitance M = sigma * T ^ 4 (units W / m ^ 2 )
9. The total power exited through the 2 thermal radiating sides of the pyramid is then Aout * M
10. Select a desired temperature and solve for h / L (to stay dimensionless and get the ratio of the pyramid height to its base side length), lets run the satellite at 300 K = ~26 deg C just as an example.
11. If you solve this for h / L we get: h / L = sqrt( ( 1360 W / m ^ 2 / (sigma * T ^ 4 ) ) ^ 2 - 1/4 )
12. Numerically for 300K target temperature we get: h/L = sqrt((1360 / (5.67 * 10^-8 * 300 ^ 4)) ^ 2 - 1/4) = 2.91870351609271066729
13. So the pyramid height of "horribly poor cooling capability in space" would be a shocking 3 times the side length of the square solar panel array.
As a child I was obsessed with computer technology, and this will resonate with many of you: computer science is the poor man's science, as soon as a computer becomes available in the household, some children autodidactically educate themselves in programming etc. This is HN, a lot of programmers who followed the poor man's science path out of necessity. I had the opportunity to choose something else, I chose physics. No amount of programming and acquiring titles of software "engineer" will be a good substitute for physicists and engineers that actually had courses on the physical sciences, and the mathematics to follow the important historical deductions... It's very hard to explain this to the people who followed the path I had almost taken. And they downvote me because they didn't have the opportunity, courage or stamina to take the path I took, and so they blindly copy paste each others doomscrolled arguments.
Look I'm not an elon fanboy... but when I read people arguing that cooling considerations excludes this future, while I know you can set the temperature arbitrarily low but not below background temperature of the universe 4 K, then I simply explain that obviously the area can be made arbitrarily large, so the temperature can be chosen by the system designer. But hey the HN crowd prefers the layers of libraries and abstractions and made themselves an emulation of an emulation of an emulation of a pre-agreed reality as documented in datasheets and manuals, and is ultimately so removed from reality based communities like physics and physics engineering, that the "democracy" programmers opinions dominate...
So go ahead and give me some more downvotes ;)
If you like mnemonics for important constants: here's one for the Stefan Boltzman constant: 5.67 * 10^-8 W / m^2 / K ^ 4
thats 4 consecutive digits 5,6,7,8 ; comma or point after the first significant digit and the exponent 8 has a minus sign.
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.
people heavily underestimate radiative cooling, probably because precisely our atmosphere hinders its effective utilization!
lesson: its not because radiative cooling is hard to exploit on earth at sea level, that its similarily ineffective in space!
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 whole concept is still insane though, fwiw.
This is precisely why my didactic example above uses a convex shape, a pyramid. This guarantees each surface absorbs or radiates energy without having to take into account self-obscuring by satellite shape.
A very high end desktop pulls more electricity than the whole JWST... Which is about the same as a hair dryer.
Now you need about 50x more for a rack and hundreds/thousands racks for a meaningful cluster. Shaded or not it's a shit load of radiators
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-deliv...
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.
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.
for a reasonable temperature (check my comment for updated calculations) the height of a square based pyramidal satellite would be about 3 times the side length of its base, quite reasonable indeed. Thats with the square base of the pyramid as solar panel facing the sun, and the top of the pyramid facing away, so all sides are in the shade of the base. I even halved my theoretical cooling power to keep calculations simple: to avoid a long confusing calculation of the heat emitted by earth, I handicapped my design so 2 of the pyramidal side surfaces are reflective (facing earth) and the remaining 2 side triangles of the pyramid are the only used thermal radiative cooling surfaces. Less pessimistic approaches are possible, but would make the calculation less didactic for the HN crowd.
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.
The larger you make the area, the more solar energy you are collecting. More shade = more heat to radiate. You are not actually making the problem easier.
for a target temperature of 300K that would mean the pyramid height would be a bit less than 3 times higher than the square base side length h=3L.
I even handicapped my example by only counting heat radiation from 2 of the 4 panels, assuming the 2 others are simply reflective (to make the calculation of a nearby warm Earth irrelevant).
Building this is definitely not trivial and not easy to make arbitrarily large.
for a 4 m x 4 m solar panel, the height of the pyramid would have to be 12 m to attain ~ 300 K on the radiator panels. Thats also the cold side for your compute.
for a 4 km x 4 km solar panel the height of the pyramid would be 12 km.
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.
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.
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.
"Radiators can shadow each other," this is precisely why I chose a convex shape, that was not an accident, I chose a pyramid just because its obvious that the 4 triangular sides can be kept in the shade with respect to the sun, and their area can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the height of the pyramid for a constant base. A convex shape guarantees that no part of the surface can appear in the hemispherical view of any other part of the surface.
The only size limit is technological / economical.
In practice h = 3xL where L was the square base side length, suffices to keep the temperature below 300K.
If heat conduction can't be managed with thermosiphons / heat pipes / cooling loops on the satellite, why would it be possible on earth? Think of a small scale satellite with pyramidal sats roughly h = 3L, but L could be much smaller, do you actually see any issue with heat conduction? scaling up just means placing more of the small pyramidal sats.
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.
Either that or your talking out of your ass.
FYI a single modern rack consumes twice the energy of the entire ISS, in a much much much much smaller package and you'll need thousands of them. You'd need 500-1000 sqm of radiator per rack and that alone would weight several tonnes...
You'll also have to actively cool down your gigantic solar panel array
Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
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.
Light rail, generally refers to urban rail, "trams".
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....
This current announcement seems silly, though.
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 hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....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 or Amazon or IBM....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 or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier
Can we evaluate based on the stated goals, or why does the criteria keep shifting?
Elon Musk has already revolutionized three industries:
1. EVs: Before Tesla, no one thought electric cars could be a mass-market product. And even today, the Model 3 and Model Y are at the top of almost all sales lists.
2. Orbital Launch: No one expected Space X to succeed. What does a software guy know about real engineering? But today, re-usable rockets are the way of the future, and Space X is at least 5 to 10 years ahead of any other company.
3. Satellite Communications: Every single major military power is trying to deploy their own version of Starlink. Before Starlink, 50 satellites was considered a big constellation. Starlink has 8,000 satellites and they are literally launching hundreds every month.
I know it's impossible to prove a counter-factual, but I'm convinced that none of these three would have happened without Elon. No other Western car company has (even now) produced a profitable EV. No other space company has prices as low as Space X. No one even has the capability to build a Starlink competitor (not yet at least). Without Elon pushing these projects, they simply would not have happened or would have happened decades later (after China or someone else beat us to it).
Even his not-yet-successful projects are far beyond most other companies:
Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.
Neuralink has actually helped patients.
Tesla FSD actually does work (I use it all the time), and even if Waymo is ahead, Tesla is easily in second place.
I 100% get the hatred for Elon Musk. His political positions are absolutely worth criticizing and I cringe most of the time he tweets. But to deny his business and engineering ability is just motivated reasoning.
Such illusions are ultimately self-defeating. The more opposed one is to Elon Musk (in business or politics) the more important it is to see his capabilities clearly.
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.
Broadly, your point is still valid, though. Just a mild inaccuracy between the Gilded Age and the roaring 20s.
This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
A lot. As someone that has been responsible for trainings with up to 10K GPUs, things fail all the time. By all the time I don't mean every few weeks, I mean daily. From disk failings, to GPU overheating, to infiniband optical connectors not being correctly fastened and disconnecting randomly, we have to send people to manually fix/debug things in the datacenter all the time.
If one GPU fails, you essentially lose the entire node (so 8 GPUs), so if your strategy is to just turn off whatever fails forever and not deal with it, it's gonna get very expensive very fast.
And thats in an environment where temperature is very well controlled and where you don't have to put your entire cluster through 4 Gs and insane vibrations during take off.
And cooling. There is no cold water or air in space.
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.
Just because an idea has some factors in its favor (Space-based datacenter: 100% uptime solar, no permitting problems [2]) doesn't mean it isn't ridiculous on its face. We're in an AI bubble, with silly money flowing like crazy and looking for something, anything to invest it. That, and circular investments to keep the bubble going. Unfortunately this gives validation to stupid ideas, it's one of the hallmarks of bubbles. We've seen this before.
The only things that space-based anything have advantages on are long-distance communication and observation, neither of which datacenters benefit from.
The simple fact is that anything that can be done in a space-based datacenter can be done cheaper on Earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal for the obtuse
[2] until people start having qualms about the atmospheric impact of all those extra launches and orbital debris
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/data-center/dgx-h200/?utm_sourc...
Power draw is max 10.2 kW but average draw would be 60-70% of that. let's call it 6kW.
It is possible to obtain orbits that get 24/7 sunlight - but that is not simple. And my understanding is it's more expensive to maintain those orbits than it would be to have stored battery power for shadow periods.
Average blackout period is 30-45 minutes. So you'd need at least 6 kWh of storage to avoid draining the batteries to 0. But battery degradation is a thing. So 6 kWh is probably the absolute floor. That's in the range of 50-70 kg for off-the-shelf batteries.
You'd need at least double the solar panel capacity of the battery capacity, because solar panels degrade over time and will need to charge the batteries in addition to powering the gpu's. 12 kW solar panels would be the absolute floor. A panel system of that size is 600-800 kg.
These are conservative estimates I think. And I haven't factored in the weight of radiators, heat and radiation shielding, thermal loops, or anything else that a cluster in space might need. And the weight is already over 785 kg.
Using the $1,500 per kg, we're approaching $1.2 million.
Again, this is a conservative estimate and without accounting for most of the weight (radiators) because I'm too lazy to finish the napkin math.
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?
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?
I wouldn't exactly call this a success, for that matter.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
Land and permitting. I’m not saying the math works. Just that there are envelopes for it to.
This is absolutely not true. I’ve worked on some of this stuff. Permitting costs months, which in dollar terms pays for launch costs ten-fold.
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.
Don't assume this. Why would you assume this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't make sense (neither does Tesla's valuation, for example), but it is what it is.
Both Spacex and Xai have investors lining up.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.planetary.org/articles/20170929-spacex-updated-c...
Ooh, happy 10th anniversary, FSD?
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.
I meant it specifically for figuring out cooling computers in space.
I am pretty sure this is going to be a solvable problem if this is the bottleneck to achieve data centers in space, given that newer chips are much more tolerant to high temperatures.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/01/07/new-ai-chips-wi...
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.
This is starting to get really serious.
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 terrestrial 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 where the power supply is the sun, the orbital plane gives the nodes power 24/7, and the dude with the Sawzall needs to buy >10,000x (not sure of the the multiple here) the Sawzalls, and also give them escape 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?
However, I think it did accomplish my goal. I bet that we could now have a beer/tea, and laugh together.
If you are ever near Wroclaw, Prague, Leipzig/Dresden, or Seattle, please email my username at the the big G. I would happily meet you at the nearest lovely hotel bar. HN mini meetup. I can only imagine the stories that we might exchange.
Look, I'm Australian, I enjoy a bit of banter. I stripped the personal info from my comment above; I was happy to share with you, reluctant to leave it as was.
I was a frequent Toronto visitor, for the TSX, back when we ran a minerals intelligence service before passing that onto Standard&Poor.
You're on the list, however my movements are constrained for now, my father's a feriously active nonagenarian which is keeping me with one foot nailed to the ground here for now.
Planned lifespan of Starlink satellites is 5years.
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.
> 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.
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.
Honestly that story sounds right up Pete Hegseth's alley.
> Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man
"King George, another royal blessed by the divine."
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?
Sure, but that's not enough.
> These people are hardly genuises.
You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)
(Defining "genius" is a whole nother thing, but using any common vernacular meaning, my statement will apply.)
Not all billionaires, of course. In context, we're talking about Ellison and Musk. There may be others implied. These people are in fact extremely intelligent. What's missing is not horsepower.
Who he is is irrelevant.
Eh. Brand new markets, perhaps. But established markets in the US favor incumbents and encourage monopoly.
You just responded to one of them.
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.
Starlink satellites use space-rated AMD Versal chips: https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-chips-are-powering-newest-sta...
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.
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.
Don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
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.
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?
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.
We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ?
yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the land is needed. Hell it's even in the Tesla Master Plan v3 docs [1] - current limitation being storage & distribution
so all you - are now witnessing to the greatest scam ever pulled on earth.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo [1]: https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense.
It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects. Even if AI dataenters in space are break-even it would be a massive win for SpaceX and leave their competition far behind.
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.
Your sources might be shady (Elektrek?).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...
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...
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
No? ISS isn't exempt from legal systems.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
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.
IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
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.
With recent developments, projected use is now skyrocketing like never seen since.
Before that I thought it was calculated that if alternative energy could be sufficiently ramped up, there would be electricity too cheap to meter.
I would like to see that first.
Whoever has the attitude to successfully do "whatever it takes" to get it done would be the one I trust do it in space after that.
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 a single cluster today would already require more solar & cooling capacity than all starlink satellites combined.
I vaguely recall an article a while ago about the impact of GPU reliability: a big problem with training is that the entire cluster basically operates in lock-step, with each node needing the data its neighbors calculated during the previous step to proceed. The unfortunate side-effect is that any failure stops the entire hundred-thousand-node cluster from proceeding - as the cluster grows even the tiniest failure rate is going to absolutely ruin your uptime. I think they managed to somehow solve this, but I have absolutely no idea how they managed to do it.
And for data centers, the satellite wouldn't be as far apart as starlight satellites, they would be quite close instead.
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.
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)
This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
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.
But seriously, I think legally satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country they were launched from.
There's obviously quite a lot of autocratist illiberals in tech.
Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
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.
+ spacex already is the best way for many payloads to get to space.
+ starlink is already the best low orbit based connectivity solution.
+ x is already a great way to train virtual world AI.
+ tesla (and its robots) is a great way to train physical world AI.
+ space takes big $ and talent - this combo would have both.
the IF at the top is just that. but feels like an interesting convo for this crowd.
It is all very puzzling to me.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
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.
Why?
Is financial fraud consistent with our national prestige?
There are better companies.
You're right, that may be all we have left to show for it if people can't come up with something better.
Whether it's Musk or anybody else who's a real example of outright fraud, in a top position where honesty and straightforward dealing mean more than anything.
I think the parent's point stands. There's a lot more pragmatic concern with the damage SpaceX could do in 2026, versus the damage Nazis could do in the 1960s.
So, basically give ourselves Kessler syndrome. Or is Elon trying to monopolize orbit entirely?
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.
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.
> 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.
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’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.
I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi
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
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?)
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
It's not comparable to any data center.
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.
Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.
The man's a moron.
You know what's even harder to cool?
> Orbital Data Centers
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.
(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)
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.
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!
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.
And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.
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.
From a finance and accounting point of view this makes everything more cloudy. Which certain types of people really like.
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.
It's just a dumbest idea ever if Elon truly believes it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't.
Socialized losses, privatized profits. As is the American way.
I think Elon's taken one too many puffs of hopium
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
One of the dumbest things I've ever read.
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
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.
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...
What makes you think it isn’t?
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
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.
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath...
(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")
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?
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
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 cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.
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.