Elon Musk is betting that AI’s future lies not on Earth, but in orbit — a claim he has put at the centre of his $1.25tn plan to merge SpaceX with his lossmaking start-up xAI.
The tech billionaire, who aims to launch an initial public offering for the newly combined company this year, argues that vast fleets of satellites powered by solar energy and cooled by the vacuum of space will become the cheapest way to generate AI computing power. Musk believes this will happen within the next three years.
Satellite executives, investors and researchers said that Musk’s timeline for putting data centres in space is highly ambitious. But many agree that the underlying idea is increasingly plausible, as long as launch costs continue to fall and demand for AI compute keeps surging.