Elon Musk says the lift capacity of SpaceX’s Starship could enable a rapid expansion of space-based artificial intelligence that surpasses the scale of the entire US electrical grid.
In a post on X, Musk says Starship can deliver AI satellites to orbit that can capture energy from the sun at a capacity far surpassing US electricity generation on Earth.
“Starship should be able to deliver around 300 GW per year of solar-powered AI satellites to orbit, maybe 500 GW. The ‘per year’ part is what makes this such a big deal.
Average US electricity consumption is around 500 GW, so at 300 GW/year, AI in space would exceed the entire US economy just in intelligence processing every two years.”
He adds that the solar manufacturing needed to support such deployments is already available and exceeds global requirements for terrestrial energy applications.
“Solar cell production for terrestrial applications is already far above this number at greater than 1500 GW of annual production capacity.”
Last week, Musk said that AI in space is inevitable, as domestic energy infrastructure is already being tapped out to sustain the rapid data center buildout.
Musk says Starship’s lift capability is designed to eliminate tonnage constraints for large-scale satellite deployment, shifting the bottleneck to semiconductor production.
“Tonnage to orbit will be solved by Starship.
Chip production is therefore the major piece of the puzzle to be solved.
The Tesla Terafab is needed for this, as there is otherwise no solution at sufficient scale. These numbers are immense by earthly standards, but don’t register materially on the Kardashev II scale. For that, lunar production of solar-powered AI satellites is needed to take things to the 100-plus TW/year level.”
Earlier this week, Musk said Tesla is now an AI chip company while unveiling its ambitious plan to ship more chips than everyone else.
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