Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

**Elon Musk** (0:00)
So, are there really three hours of questions? Or are you fucking serious?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:03)
Yeah. You don't think there's a lot to talk about, Elon?

**Elon Musk** (0:08)
Only point, man.

**John** (0:11)
It's the most interesting point. All the storylines are kind of converging right now. So, we'll see how much...

**Elon Musk** (0:17)
It's almost like I planned it.

**John** (0:19)
Exactly.

**Elon Musk** (0:20)
That would never do such a thing.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:23)
So, as you know better than anybody else, the total cost of ownership of a data center, only 10% to 15% is energy, and that's the part you're presumably saving by moving this into space. Most of it's the GPUs. If they're in space, it's harder to service them, or you can't service them. And so, the depreciation cycle goes down on them. So, it's just way more expensive to have the GPUs in space, presumably. What's the reason to put them in space?

**Elon Musk** (0:45)
Well, the availability of energy is the issue.
So, I mean, if you look at electrical output outside of China, for everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It's very, you know, maybe a slight increase, but for pretty close to flat. China has a rapid increase in electrical output. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity, especially as you scale? The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So, how are you going to turn them with chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity ferries?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:24)
I mean, you're famously a big fan of solar, one terawatt of solar power, so with a 25 percent capacity factor, like four terawatts of solar panels, it's like one percent of the land area of the United States. And you were in the singularity when you got one terawatt of data centers, right? So, what are you running out of exactly?

**Elon Musk** (1:42)
How far into the singularity are you?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:44)
You tell me.

**Elon Musk** (1:45)
Yeah, exactly. So, I think we'll find we're in the singularity and like, okay, we still got a long way to go.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:51)
But is the plan to put it in the space after we've covered Nevada and solar panels?

**Elon Musk** (1:56)
I think it's pretty hard to cover Nevada and solar panels. You have to get permits from, try getting the permits for that.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:02)
So, space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space.

**Elon Musk** (2:08)
It's harder to scale on ground than it is to scale in space. But also, you're going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground. And you don't need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt which says it's always sunny in space. Which it is.
So, because you don't have a day night cycle or seasonality, clouds or an atmosphere in space, because the atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy. So, any given solar panel is going to do about five times more power and space than on the ground. And you avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. So, it's actually much cheaper to do it in space. And my prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less, maybe 30 months.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:17)
36 months?

**Elon Musk** (3:17)
Less than 36 months.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:19)
How do you service GPUs as they fail? Which happens quite often in training.

**Elon Musk** (3:24)
Actually, it depends on how recent the GPUs are that are arrived. I mean, at this point, we find our GPUs to be quite reliable. There's infrared mortality, which you can obviously iron out on the ground. So, you can just run them on the ground and confirm that you don't have infrared mortality with the GPUs. But once they start working, their actual reliability, once they start working and you're past the initial debug cycle of NVIDIA or whoever is making the chips, could be Tesla AI6 chips or something like that, or it could be TPUs or trainings or whatever, the rivalries actually, they're quite reliable past a certain point.
So I don't think the servicing thing is an issue, but you can mock my words. In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space. And then it will get, it will then be like ridiculously better to be in space. And then the scaling, the only place you can really scale is space.