‘The race is on’: will Elon Musk be the first to put a data centre in space?

{"text":[[{"start":9.64,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":23.770000000000003,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":43.57000000000001,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":63.370000000000005,"text":"“This is not just a bright shiny object that Elon has invented for his IPO,” said Will Marshall, chief executive of Planet, a satellite company that is working with Google to pilot orbital data centres. “This is a project whose time has come.” "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":80.61,"text":"The idea of generating computing power in space dates back to a 1941 Isaac Asimov story, Reason, which depicts a network of orbital space stations generating solar energy that is beamed back to Earth. "}],[{"start":95.66,"text":"The 21st-century twist is to use that solar power to fuel AI chips, shuttling the data back to Earth using satellite networks such as SpaceX’s Starlink."}],[{"start":107.75,"text":"Huge fleets of thousands of satellites, networked together and held in a “sun synchronous” low Earth orbit, could respond to users’ AI queries at a speed not too different to today’s terrestrial chatbots, advocates say. "}],[{"start":122.43,"text":"“Mark my words: in 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space,” Musk told Stripe’s Cheeky Pint podcast last week. "}],[{"start":137.22,"text":"While one former xAI employee said the idea “seems to have come out of nowhere and is totally unproven”, Musk is not the only Big Tech executive pursuing the concept. "}],[{"start":149.76,"text":"Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is also co-chief of a secretive new AI start-up, Project Prometheus, in October predicted the construction of “giant gigawatt data centres in space” in the coming years. "}],[{"start":163.54999999999998,"text":"Google plans a “learning mission” for what it has dubbed “Project Suncatcher” with Planet by early 2027, launching two prototype satellites containing its tensor processing unit AI chips into low Earth orbit. "}],[{"start":178.98999999999998,"text":"Two start-ups, Starcloud and Aetherflux, are planning to launch GPUs into space within the next 12 months. "}],[{"start":188.29,"text":"Aetherflux’s founder Baiju Bhatt said the AI boom had created a “once-in-a-generation inflection point in energy usage” that had created a “huge economic incentive” to put AI in space. "}],[{"start":203.98999999999998,"text":"While many of today’s AI data-centre projects are bogged down in planning or power-supply delays, launching chips into space could bring them online “at industrial manufacturing pace rather than real estate pace”, with access to, in effect, limitless energy. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":222.04,"text":"“This is going to be one of the catalysts for massively industrialising access to space,” said Bhatt, who previously co-founded trading app Robinhood. “We don’t need to invent new material to do this.”"}],[{"start":236.22,"text":"Steve Collar, a former chief executive of SES, one of the world’s largest satellite operators, said: “Elon is always years ahead of the technology and the reality, but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong. It can be both self-serving and right at the same time.” "}],[{"start":255.11,"text":"“The good part is you have unlimited and efficient access to solar and . . . space is really cold,” said Collar, who now chairs SWISSto12, a satellite communications company. “Those two things are massively helpful for a system that is enormously power hungry and enormously heat-generative.” "}],[{"start":276.74,"text":"Philip Johnston, co-founder of Starcloud, believes the technology “100 per cent is definitely going to be proven in two or three years, probably this year”. He added: “It’s a complete no-brainer: in the next 10 years all compute will be built in space.” "}],[{"start":295.42,"text":"But the economics hinge on several unproven assumptions. First, that the price of launching large constellations of satellites will fall dramatically. Second, that chips such as Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the workhorses of terrestrial AI data centres today, can be shielded from radiation and cooled in the vacuum of space. Crucially, the concept assumes that advances in AI will continue to demand ever-greater computing power. "}],[{"start":326.66,"text":"A Google research paper in November estimated that if launch prices fall to less than $200 per kg — from costs of at least $1,000/kg today — then the cost of launching and operating a space-based data centre would be “roughly comparable” to an equivalent terrestrial data centre on a per-kilowatt/year basis. "}],[{"start":350.04,"text":"That threshold will not be reached until the “mid-2030s”, the paper said. "}],[{"start":355.53000000000003,"text":"Some are betting that economic calculus will change with the advent of reusable rockets such as SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn, which promise to bring down costs dramatically. SpaceX has already filed paperwork with the US Federal Communications Commission seeking permission to launch as many as 1mn satellites for AI. "}],[{"start":381.21000000000004,"text":"Many in the tech industry remain sceptical that these barriers can be overcome. "}],[{"start":386.75000000000006,"text":"“I don’t know if you’ve seen a rack of servers recently but they’re heavy,” Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, said on stage at a Cisco conference last week in San Francisco. "}],[{"start":399.94000000000005,"text":"Planet’s Marshall said he had been discussing the concept with Google for several years before Musk and Bezos started promoting the idea late last year. "}],[{"start":411.28000000000003,"text":"Given the complexity of engineering these systems, he believes that the economic case could stack up sooner than the technology is ready. "}],[{"start":421.08000000000004,"text":"“A lot of architectural decisions haven’t been figured out,” Marshall said. “But none of this is insurmountable . . . The race is on.”"}],[{"start":430.61,"text":"Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle, Stephen Morris and Rafe Rosner-Uddin"}],[{"start":446.89,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1770764661_3722.mp3"}