Elon Musk says artificial intelligence will move off the planet within just a few years as compute demand overwhelms Earth’s power grid.
Speaking at the US Saudi Investment Forum, Musk notes that harnessing the sun directly from orbit will unlock far more energy than ground-based systems can provide.
He says Earth only receives a tiny fraction of the sun’s energy, highlighting that domestic infrastructure is already struggling to keep up with the rapid acceleration of machine power.
“If civilization continues, which it probably will, then AI in space is inevitable…. The Earth only receives roughly one two-billionth of the Sun’s energy. So if you want to have something that is, say, a million times more energy than Earth could possibly produce, you must go into space.”
Musk specifically notes the limits of terrestrial power buildouts, especially if companies attempt to scale compute at current trajectories.
“Let us say you wanted to do 200 or 300 gigawatts per year of AI compute. It is very difficult to do that on Earth. The US average electricity usage, last time I checked, was around 460 gigawatts per year average usage. That would be like two-thirds of US electricity production per year. There’s no way you’re building power plants at that level. And then if you take it up to, say, a terawatt per year, impossible.”
For Musk, the path is obvious, and that space-based energy generation will happen in four or five years. Constant sunlight in orbit, lower material costs and natural radiative cooling give space a decisive advantage as AI workloads explode.
“In space, you have continuous solar. You actually do not need batteries because it is always sunny in space. And the solar panels actually become cheaper because you don’t need glass or framing. And the cooling is just radiative.”
Earlier this month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled that Google is preparing for an effort to take the artificial intelligence arms race off the planet with Project Suncatcher. The initiative is designed to harness near-continuous solar energy and build tightly clustered satellite formations above Earth, as a way to break out of the energy bottleneck on the ground.
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