Elon Musk - Data Centers in Space - June 8, 2026 🚀

Kind: captions Language: en All right. Well, hello everybody and welcome uh hanging out. I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starling team. Figured we'd check in. It's been, you know, typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle, >> acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terrorized chip building project. And so, >> yeah, never a dull moment. >> Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year. And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multilanetary, starting to climb up the Carterv scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stat stuff, kind of start galaxy sized and bring people in with the Carterv scale. >> What's the big picture? >> What's the big picture? What is the Carter Chehv scale? >> Like how do you decide what progress the civilization has made? Um that's the most objective metric uh that any alien species say visiting us uh would calibrate how how much progress we've made um as a civilization. And one of the most subjective ways to do that is the amount of power that is any given civilization has been able to harness. Um and uh there was a Russian physicist actually I think by the name of Kadeshv um who thought about this and it's and it's I think it's a good way to characterize it which is uh you can have you can you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's uh type one. And then type two would be uh how much of the stars power are you harnessing? And then type three would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing? Um these are very objective and measurable numbers. U so right now we're very low on the kadesv one scale. Like if you say like what proportion of uh our planet's power uh are we harnessing? It's a very very tiny number. Um and uh and and basically we we're harnessing almost nothing of our stars power. So the the sun uh is truly an immense thing. It is it is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is. But this gives you sort of a sense of scale. >> Yeah. It's um >> it's it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two. >> Very big difficulty jump. Yes. and level three and we don't even know how to do level three really. We'll get Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. AI will figure it out. I told one way to appreciate this the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system. >> So the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. It's uh everything and and then of the remaining uh one you know.14% most of that is Jupiter one planet >> so we're still lightweight. >> Yes. Uh the entire mass of earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. We're we're like a earth is a tiny dust moat compared to the sun. But but how much energy are we talking like coming from the sun especially compared to what we're using here on earth? It feels like >> yeah the incident solar energy on the cross-section of the earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's um power output. Um and and the vast majority of that we we cannot use because uh you know 70% of earth is water. >> Uh we should technically our planet should be called water. Um because that is 70% water and I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like why are they calling it earth when it is mostly water. >> We're the we're the greenlands not green of the of the galley of the solar system. >> Yeah. Um a bunch of the the exactly even even we're 70% water and 30% that's land. A bunch of it is uh you know Antarctica or you know Siberia type of thing. Very northern Canada type of thing. very difficult to not not places people typically want to live and you're not going to get a lot of uh solar power in at the poles. >> So the actual usable area of land that where you can get solar power is quite small anyway in in order to ascend the cart scale in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harness uh you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to say a millionth of the power output of the sun, >> um you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million. So we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. Um and a trillion is a million times a million. Uh so so basically there's we're we're basically practically nowhere um on on the sort of the Kadeshv 2 scale. Practically nowhere. >> So in Carterv scale we're all still we're like not a we're not even >> Yeah. We're we're we're so we're not we're not registering. >> Not even a micro soul. >> Yeah. We're >> No. And so to actually >> one micros would be an epic epic achievement relative to where we are right now. >> Something to aspire to. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's our goal. Like this is I think both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are and and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve uh power harness being 1 millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a micros >> to actually start getting there though, we're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need. Like you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that like maybe now is the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two? I mean, getting to a percent of the sun's energy, >> maybe not a percent. [clears throat] Let's go like we'll move the decimal point back and you're an extremely kick-ass civilization if you get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilization is going to be uh vastly more powerful than us to say the least. Yeah. Um, so in order to start to make some progress uh on the cottage scale, we need to uh launch satellites to to to orbit Earth uh and capture uh solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and uh deal with cooling cuz uh cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. Um you can just radiate to the vacuum. Um and um and so what what we're proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the cartes scale to I don't know be kind of like a respectable civilization. Um so when the aliens hopefully there are aliens out there and they uh maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used. >> Yeah. um that's not like totally pathetic, [laughter] >> which is the current situation. >> And so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible. >> Yeah. What does it take to scale? >> Yeah. >> Um so things it takes to scale um are you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us. uh that large mass. So you know you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put a 100 gawatt or ultimately a terowatt into space from earth uh you need uh you you will at some point need a terowatt of solar um and then you're going to need a terowatt of AI chips. So, the three things on you need are mass orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators, of course, and uh a lot of chips. >> All right. Well, let's start ticking down the list. So, master orbit, that's where Starship comes in. We just had >> first flight to V3 was awesome. >> I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch. Yeah. >> And like long time coming. What's kind of what's Starship's kind of purpose of being? what is it going to be doing? >> Yeah. So, Starship is going to it's going to revolutionize space really. It's um it's the first rocket design uh that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multilanetary uh as well as to ascend the cottage scale. you you simply cannot extend the the caut scale unless you have a re reusable spacecraft and you cannot extend life uh to the moon to Mars and the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. Um the cost is simply prohibitive. You you can't you can't make enough rockets. >> Yeah. >> Uh unless you fly unless you can refly them. Uh just like any other mode of transport, you can imagine that if uh if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, uh flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes. >> You're doing a whole lot more driving. Rapid reusability. [laughter] >> Um every mode of transport is reusable um without which is simply not viable as as a transport uh system. Uh so cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable. Yeah. >> Um, with rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. Um, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. Um, and there have been, you know, many prior attempts to create a re a fully reusable rocket. Um, and they most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they they didn't think they could succeed. uh in order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, um the choice of propellant, uh you've got you've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy. Uh the the rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. And then you you've got to achieve full reusability. Then you've also you got to go a step beyond that, which is um make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand, and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection like an aircraft. >> Yeah. >> Um this is incredibly difficult. Uh this is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. I it it also happens to be the the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, >> the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship B3 is more than double the thrust of it, the Saturn 5 moon rocket. Uh by version four, we'll be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn 5 moon rocket. And we expect this we expect Starship to be flying um more than once per hour down the road. >> One of the fun facts from flight 12 that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do. So >> yes, >> I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly. I mean we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what mass orbit becomes once Starship is flying? >> It's it's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So even with Falcon uh 9, Falcon Heavy, uh SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. Um I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. Um and then most of the remaining mass I think is is launched by China and then the rest of the world including the rest of the US is the remaining I don't know 5 to 7%. Um now with with Starship we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit. Um and to do so in a pretty short period of time. So we think probably we can get to uh a million tons uh to orbit per year in in in about 3 years thereabouts. >> Starship Starship is going to take care of the master orbit limiting factor. >> Yes. >> And then power generation. So first and Ian maybe you can help. >> Sure. People probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say like data center in space. Like we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there. Like these actually look like pretty different. And so kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space. >> Yeah. I I think it's it's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't actually know what what the inside of a data center even looks like, right? >> Yeah. And >> it's some like mythical place where the the internet's in the cloud or something. >> Yeah. Some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but like effectively it comes down to uh a set number of of chips and and and the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. Uh the more challenging part is figuring out how to get how do you get the power for it. Uh and and that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starwing technology, the solar arrays, um are what we want to utilize uh that expertise to to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into space itself. Um we like to look at this and say like what is what is the actual engineering problem here? and and it's it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space as you mentioned. >> Yeah. Uh now the the the AI satellite is uh actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. It's a Starlink satellite has has gigantic phase ray antennas. Uh it's got u you know parabolic antennas. It's got uh you a lot of laser links. Um it's a it's it's much more complicated than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is essentially a lot of uh solar cells, um a radiator, and uh you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the the super complex uh antennas that you have on a Solink satellite. So, I mean, given the two, the easier one to design for is the um the AI satellite. Yeah, >> it's just a little bit bigger. [laughter] >> Just bigger. >> Just make stuff bigger. Yeah. I was like, so we've got >> this is our AI1. If you guys want to walk us through. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, so the first thing that we're we're really looking at here is like first you've got to make something compelling. Uh, right. And and we thought that the right place to start is uh around the 150 kowatt like peak power level. Um, but as we look at the workloads with with our experience with XAI, uh, we get to actually see the that we can also support about 120 kW of average compute. There's a difference. >> And what we're showing here is kind of a a draft version of the version one of the of the SpaceX AI satellite, an AI1, I guess you could call it. Um and uh seems like a reasonable place to start is 150 kW peak power, 120 kW sustained power. And um and to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiators, size of the solar panels, um the assumptions here are uh 250 W per square meter for the solar array and um about 1,400 watts per square meter for the radiators. So the radiators, these are double-sided radiators are radiating both sides. They're uh oriented knife edge to the sun and uh and and it's 1400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal. Over time we think we could probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1400 watts per square meter for the uh solar panels and radiators respectively. Um but this gives you like a a is pretty much what the satellite's going to look like. It's a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small by comparison. >> And these are like evolutions of of things that we have actually already launched in in in our Starling constellation to date. >> That's that's really I think the the cool part to me is that we're we're looking at solar technology that we already are are going to use on on the V3 uh Starlink vehicle. So, uh I I'm like really excited to then just take those and make it bigger. >> Yeah. Part of what we want what we want to convey here is that this there's not some um magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the AI satellites. Uh as Ian said, this is a lot of this is u technology we've already made for the stalling B3 satellites. Uh so it's it's we we basically we don't think this is a a super hard problem compared to things we already do. Mhm. >> Um there would also be probably something on the order of a terabit of connectivity of laser link connectivity from the uh from the satellite. >> Um the 150 kW peak uh power level is roughly matches what say an Nvidia GV300 uh rack would do. So if you've got a GV300 with 72 GPUs, uh it peak power I think is around 140 kW. Um but it's rarely it's it's almost impossible to get it to to be at that peak power. Um a more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120 20 kow average power. Um but but it can peak up to 150. So that's it's basically think of it as a a rack of compute in space and then you can connect the these these racks of compute to uh either each other by the laser links um or directly to the stalling constellations. So you can close the link uh with the Starink constellation and then Starlink can then um uh send that data to the ground uh using the existing KA and KU uh antennas on the on the vehicle. Um it also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So uh and this this would not be at a particularly high latency. you know, we're talking about, you know, maybe being around 6 to 800 kilometers above the Earth. Uh, and light travels 300 km per millisecond. So, that's uh it's about, you know, 3 milliseconds away basically. It's not not very far. >> Won't worry about that too much though. >> It's sometimes people think there's going to be some like high latency. I'm like, yeah, it's no speed of light moves pretty fast. >> Light moves pretty fast. It's a tall one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the cool thing also is the uh the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing uh solar race for the V3 vehicle. Um kind of kind of in that that realm where we're flying today. >> Yeah. So I mean they got they got about a 70 m wingspan. So these they're fairly large. We're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there. But >> you like to say like space is in the name like there's there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even, you know, up to a million satellites, >> Yeah. >> you got plenty of room to move around up there. >> Yeah. Space is really big. So it's not like it's not like space is going to get crowded. Uh space is is enormous. Like if you zoom in close to the satellite, it looks big. But if you actually look at it relative relative to the Earth, these satellites are so tiny you can you can't even see them. So they're they're very very tiny compared to Earth. >> And I mean we have 10 about 10,000 Starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now. Right. >> We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. >> Uh it's it's a great thing that you know we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and and and fly them safely. That's that's a a number one goal when when we look at the constellation. >> We're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop, right? So, we've we've got this which >> so we're in that building kind of in the middle which >> Yeah, we're sitting in that building right now. >> This is my first time here. The building is massive. Like you you come around the corner, you see it through the trees and you're like, "Oh, wow." >> But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we? Uh yes, we're going to in fact we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already and uh and then we will be building out the AIAT production building soon. Um and uh yeah so we expect to have the this theat as production the solar production um and uh all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year. >> So if anybody wants to work on a AI satellites this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also so I mean like right behind us the machines are humming. We're still making all of our user terminals for Starlink here. That's not going anywhere. In fact, we're turning on new production lines for new units, right? >> Uh yes. Um in fact, these are the new Starlink terminals, uh which we made in much higher volume than than the current uh terminals. Um you know, ultimately we think there's probably going to be a few hundred million Starink terminals out there. And then our the Starlink direct to cell constellation will um connect directly to people's cell phones and enable uh high bandwidth communication directly from your phone to space. >> All right. We're we're two limiting factors down. We've got mass to orbit, got putting solar in the third one's chips. >> Yes. Um so at least in the in the beginning we can obviously launch the the chips that are already being made. Um, so our current reference design is for Nvidia uh Reuben chips or could be either GB300 or or Reuben CHFS. Um, and uh we'll also have a reference design for TPUs and and essentially you can put up put any any existing CHFs into into orbit. Um, but the current industry uh seems to be uh it seems like it's going to I don't know get to maybe around 100 gawatt a year of of AI compute but it that doesn't answer the question of well how do you get to a terowatt that's why you need uh the terra app >> always looking a step bigger yeah >> yeah in order to get to the next order of magnitude uh you need uh a gigantic ship factory. And to give you a sense of scale here, uh we expect that the terafab is going to be around 100 million square ft. Uh which is 10 times the size of the uh the Tesla Gigafactory Texas. >> And what aside from just, you know, I'm going to need Starship point to point to get from one end to the other. Aside from just the size, what's going to make this unique, different from any other chip building operation on the planet? >> Well, I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the Terra Fab, but fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there were no uh fundamental technology breakthroughs and and you simply you you could simply scale uh the existing chipm technology u with a lot of difficulty uh to a terowatt of chip output per year. Um that's you if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint that's uh that's equivalent that's like having a billion chips per year with a a kilowatt per reticle. So it's a a billion full radical equivalent chips uh each doing a kilowatt and then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that. >> A lot of people today even think orbital data centers were like a decade away. >> Yeah. I think we want to try to give people a sense of of the time frame uh we at least the time frame we're aiming for. I mean you know people should take this with a grain of salt to some degree because this is this is just our best guess. So this is not a this is not a promise of what we'll do. This is what we what what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do um which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space uh AI compute um and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in 2 and 1/2 years hitting an annualized rate of 10 gawatt a year to space in 3 and 1/2 years maybe 100 gawatt and then depending upon what progress uh there is in trip making in the rest of the world and with the terap fab uh going beyond that to scale to a terowatt per year which is 1,000 gawatt >> which is that that's twice the the current electricity consumption of the United States. >> I think there will be an appetite for that but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. So, >> I don't know what it's going to think about, but uh we do a lot of simulations or something. >> Yeah. >> So, after we've, you know, broken through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to again try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Carter Chev level two? >> Why stop there? Stop. Why think small >> cuz a terowatt actually is very small to think small. >> Let's not think small. Um so there is in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to thousandx from a terowatt per year the the only way that we can really say see that you can achieve that is on the moon with uh a mass driver essentially where you do local production of uh photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the moon. Um maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably uh make the chips on on the moon. Um and but you you need most of the mass uh to be made on the moon. So you don't have to transport it to the moon from Earth. >> And and then because the moon has no atmosphere and only 16th Earth's gravity, you can you can get you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So you can basically shoot them into space using um an electromagnetic gun like a like a rail gun type. I mean just it's basically a linear electric motor is a way to think about it. I'm fired up enough to see to see a mass driver on the moon. That would be very cool. >> Yeah. Sci-fi future. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um it would also mean that if we're if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the moon uh will be able to go to the moon. And I think that would be pretty cool. >> Yeah. I'm I'm going to be jumping first in line to get up there. >> Yeah. I mean, [clears throat] you know, everyone should go to the moon at least once, I think. >> Yeah. Just once. >> Yeah. You can move there if you want. You can go live on the moon. >> We'll see. [laughter] >> Thanks, guys, for chatting with me for a little bit. Like, excited to see a whole new type, whole new kind of satellite, whole bunch more Starship launches, >> more chips, more solar, more more everything. It's It's a big future, but I'm excited to see everybody at this company go out and build. >> All right, sounds good. It's exciting. Great.