सुहास Suhas
36.7K posts
@suhasgujarathi
speak less, listen, learn, stay calm
The first question I asked @elonmusk: What’s the point of sending GPUs into space? The whole idea behind orbital data centers is that if the launch costs continue to drop, it will become cheaper to put GPUs in orbit than to build power plants on Earth. The problem with this argument is that energy is only about 15% of a datacenter’s lifetime cost. The chips themselves are around 70%. And you still have to launch those to space! Elon kept returning to one point over and over again: It will simply not be physically possible to scale power production to the scale needed for AI on Earth. He kept pointing out the bottlenecks we’ve already run into on Earth: You can’t plug into the utilities - the interconnect queues are too long. You can’t do behind-the-meter natural gas and generate power yourself - lead times for turbines stretch past 2030. You can’t do solar on Earth, because of permits, and because of the tariffs. For it to make economical sense to shift compute to space, all of the following things would need to be true: - Power generation on Earth hits a ceiling, or AI demand outstrips every terrestrial option (for context, 1 TW of solar power is only 1% of the land area of the US, and AI currently only uses about 20 GW globally). - Chip production scales faster than power generation (because Elon builds TeraFab). It would be surprising if building and placing solar panels turned out to be harder than scaling semiconductor manufacturing. - Starship reaches thousands of launches per year. In that world, Elon wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders. And if those 3 conditions aren’t met? Well, on Earth, xAI is just gonna be one of the pack anyways - and there’s no market for the 4th best AI model. Elon’s comparative advantage was never going to be navigating utility interconnect queues or filing permits faster than Google. His advantage is SpaceX. So why not just bet on the world where SpaceX becomes the kingmaker? I asked Elon what that world looks like. 100 GW = 10,000 starship launches, and he wants to do more than that every year by 2030. That’s one starship launch every hour.
BREAKING: Biden appointed U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson just ruled the Trump admin can’t terminate the Temporary Protected Status of 60,000 migrants from Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua
Pleased to welcome US @VP @JDVance and his family in New Delhi. We reviewed the fast-paced progress following my visit to the US and meeting with President Trump. We are committed to mutually beneficial cooperation, including in trade, technology, defence, energy and people-to-people exchanges. India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership will be a defining partnership of the 21st Century for a better future of our people and the world.
