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In yet another bold prediction, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the cheapest place to put AI will be space, adding that it may happen as soon as 36 months. The tech billionaire recently appeared on Dwarkesh podcast where he discussed the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, among other topics.
Stating that its “harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space,” Musk revealed his plans to build AI data centres in space. “You’re also going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don’t need batteries,” he said. Elon Musk further stated that space does not “have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere”. “The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy,” he added.“So any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. It’s actually much cheaper to do in space,” the world’s richest person said. Elon Musk predicted that space will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. “It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months.”When asked about GPU reliability during large-scale AI training, Elon Musk said hardware failures are less of a concern than many assume—and argued that the future of AI infrastructure may lie beyond Earth.
Elon Musk said “..it depends on how recent the GPUs are that have arrived”.Musk explained that once GPUs pass this early testing phase and move beyond the initial debugging cycle—whether they are made by Nvidia, Tesla, or other chip makers such as those producing TPUs or Trainium chips—they tend to operate reliably over time. “Once they start working and you’re past the initial debug cycle… they’re quite reliable past a certain point,” he said. As a result, Musk added that ongoing servicing is not a major issue in his view.
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