Why does Elon Musk want to put AI data centers in space?

A proposed merger between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, reported completely by Reuters on Thursday, ​might give contemporary momentum to Musk’s plan to launch satellite tv for pc data centres into orbit ‌as he battles for supremacy in the quickly escalating AI race in opposition to tech giants ​like Alphabet’s Google, Meta and OpenAI.

Space-based data centres, nonetheless an early-stage idea, would doubtless depend on a whole lot of solar-powered satellites networked in orbit to deal with the large computing calls for of AI programs like xAI’s Grok or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, at a time when energy-hungry Earth-based services have gotten more and more expensive to run. Advocates say working above the ambiance affords practically fixed solar energy and eliminates the cooling burdens that dominate ground-based data-centre ​prices, doubtlessly making AI processing way more environment friendly.

But engineers and area specialists warning that industrial viability ⁠stays years away, citing main dangers from area particles, defending {hardware} in opposition to cosmic radiation, restricted choices for in-person upkeep, and launch prices. Deutsche Bank expects the primary small-scale orbital data-centre deployments in 2027–28 to take a look at each the expertise and the economics, with wider ​constellations — doubtlessly scaling into the a whole lot or hundreds— ⁠rising solely in the 2030s if these early missions work.

SpaceX is essentially the most profitable rocket-maker in historical past and has efficiently launched hundreds of satellites into orbit as a part of its Starlink web service. If space-based AI computing is the longer term, SpaceX is ‌essentially the most ideally positioned to function AI-ready satellite tv for pc clusters or facilitate the organising of on-orbit ‌computing. “It’s a no-brainer building solar-power data centres in space … the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space, and that will be true within two years, ‍three at the latest,” Musk stated on the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month.

SpaceX is contemplating an preliminary public providing this yr that would worth the rocket and satellite tv for pc firm at over $1 trillion, Reuters ‍has reported. Part of the proceeds would go to funding the event of AI data centre satellites, sources say.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been engaged on expertise for AI data centres in area, constructing on the Amazon founder’s prediction that “giant gigawatt data centers” in orbit might beat the price of their Earth-bound friends inside 10 to 20 years by tapping uninterrupted solar energy and radiating warmth immediately into area.

Nvidia-backed Starcloud has already provided a glimpse of that future: its Starcloud-1 satellite tv for pc, launched on a Falcon 9 final month, carries an Nvidia H100 – essentially the most highly effective AI chip ever positioned in orbit – and is ⁠coaching and operating Google’s open-source Gemma mannequin as a proof of idea. The firm finally envisions a modular “hypercluster” of satellites offering about 5 gigawatts of computing energy, comparable to a number of ​hyperscale data centres mixed.

Google is pushing the space-based data centre idea with Project Suncatcher, a research effort ⁠to network solar-powered satellites equipped with its Tensor Processing Units into an orbital AI cloud. The firm plans an preliminary prototype launch with associate Planet Labs round 2027.

China additionally plans to create a “Space Cloud” by launching space-based synthetic intelligence data centres over the subsequent 5 years, state media reported on Thursday. China’s most important area contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, vowed to “construct gigawatt-class space ⁠digital-intelligence infrastructure,” in accordance to a five-year improvement plan.