Space solar could make AI power far cheaper

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 0:52

   So, I mean, if you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It's very, you know, maybe a slight increase, but 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.

2. 1:16

   So how are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies? I mean, you're famously a big fan of solar, one terawatt of solar power, so with a 25% compatibility factor, like four terawatts of solar panels. It's like one percent of the land area of the United States. And that's like far in this, you were in the singularity when we've got one terawatt of data centers, right?

3. 1:40

   So what are you running out of exactly? How far into the singularity are you though? You tell me. Yeah, exactly. So I think we'll find we're in the singularity and like, oh, okay, we've still got a long way to go. but is this like a is the plan to like put it in the space after we've covered nevada and solar panels i think it's pretty hard to cover nevada and solar panels you have to get like permits from like the approach for try getting the purpose for that so space is really it's really a regulatory play it's like harder to harder to build on land than it is in space it's harder to scale um on ground than it is to scale in space uh but but also the the you're going to get about five times the um effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground and you don't need batteries um i almost wore my other shirt which says it's always sunny in space which it is

4. 2:33

   so um because you don't have a day-night cycle or uh seasonality uh clouds uh or or an atmosphere in space, because the atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy. So any given solar panels can do about five times more power in 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 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.

5. 3:16

   36 months? Less than 36 months. How do you service GPUs as they fail, which happens quite often in training? 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 infant 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 infant mortality with the GPUs.

6. 3:41

   But once they start working, their actual reliability, and once they start working and you're past the initial debug cycle of NVIDIA or whatever, or whoever's making the chips, it could be Tesla AI 6 chips or something like that, or it could be TPUs or Traniums or whatever. But the rivalries actually, they're quite reliable past certain point. So I don't think the servicing thing is an issue. But you can mark my words, in 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.

7. 4:24

   And then it will get, it'll then get like ridiculously better to be in space. And then the scaling, the only place you can really scale is space. You know, once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun's power are you harnessing, you realize you have to go to space. You can't scale very much on Earth. But by very much, to be clear, you're talking like terawatts. Yeah. Well, all of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt of power on average.

8. 4:59

   So if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that's quite a lot. And can you imagine building that many data centers, that many power plants? It's like those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. that it's actually very difficult to build power plants. And then you don't just need power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment, you need the electrical transformers to run the transformers, the AI transformers. Now, the utility industry is a very slow industry.

9. 5:40

   They pretty much, you know, they impede and smash to the government, to the Public Utility Commission. So they're very slow because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is just like, you know, like if you try to do an interconnect agreement with, have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale, like with a lot of power? As a professional podcaster, I can say that I am not, in fact.

10. 6:10

    They have to just need many more views before that becomes an issue. They have to do a study for a year, okay? Like a year later, they'll come back to you with their interconnect study. Can't you solve this with your own behind-the-meter power stuff? You can build power plants. Yeah. That's what we did at XAI for classes too. So for classes too. So yeah, why are we talking about the grid? Why not just like build GPUs and power co-located?

11. 6:33

    That's what we did. Right, but I'm saying, why isn't this a generalized solution? When you're talking about all the issues. Where do you get the power plants from? I'm saying when you're talking about all the issues, working with utilities, You can just build private power plants with the data centers. Right. But it begs the question of where do you get the power plants from? I mean- The power plant makers.

12. 6:51

    Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Like there's the gas turbine backlog, basically? Yes. You can drill down to a level further. It's the veins and blades in the turbines that are the limiting factor because the casting, it's like a very specialized process to cast the blades and veins in the turbines so you're using gas power and it's very difficult to scale other forms of power you can scale potentially solar but the tariffs currently for importing solar in the US are gigantic and the domestic solar production is pitiful Why not make solar? That seems like a good Elon shaped problem We are going to make solar Great Great.

13. 7:34

    Both SpaceX and Tesla are building towards 100 gigawatts a year of solar cell production. How low down the stack, like from polysilicon up to the wafer to the final panel? I think you've got to do the whole thing from raw materials to finish the cell. Now, if it's going to space, it costs less and it's easier to make solar cells that go to space because they don't need glass or they don't need much glass and they don't need.

14. 8:00

    heavy framing because they don't have to survive weather events. There's no weather in space. So it's actually a cheaper solar cell that goes to space than the one on the ground. Is there a path to getting them as cheap as you need in the next 36 months? Solar cells are already very cheap. They're like farcically cheap. And if you say, you know, I think like solar cells in China are around like 25, 30 cents a watt or something like that.

15. 8:29

    It's absurdly cheap, and when you take into account, now put it in space, and it's five times cheaper, because it's five times, in fact, no, it's not five times cheaper, it's ten times cheaper, because you don't need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space.