Almost all of the World’s AI Data Centers will be built in space from 2035 onwards.
We already have a medium nuclear reactors (200 MW) worth of energy in Space.
This will scale to 3-5 large nuclear reactors worth of power by 2029.
Almost all of this power has already and will in future be put up by SpaceX.
Tesla, SpaceX and XAI will work together to put 100 Gigawatts of AI in space from 2030-2033. This could take $1 to 2 trillion. This will increase to trillions per year from 2034 onwards.
Why will Tesla or SpaceX get most of this?
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Just gonna say the obvious:
SKYNET !!!! lol
It’s always computers.
I want big scale metallurgical production and such.
Instead of Earth-made craft that fly to LEO…the best RLVs will be made in LEO to fly to Earth and back.
When the general public catches on to dozens of nuke reactors in space…..waiting to re-enter… interesting…
He’s doesn’t mean there will be nuclear reactors in space powering AI clusters. He’s just using the power output of reactors as a unit. The actual source of the power is PV panels in the nearly continuous bright sunlight. One of the reasons AI clusters will be built in Space is the access to 24/7/365 Sunlight another is they can laser communicate to the existing Starlink constellation.
Why would it take 1-2 trillion? If energy powering the AI clusters is drastically lower in cost and Space X.. so, it must be the cost of launching AI cluster mass and the cost to create enough solar to capture to energy required? Ahh, and the cost of the hardware related to the AI cluster? Actually, this idea is making less sense. Just beam the energy down.
Cooling… but its probably not that simple.
As Ludus said, it will be massive amounts of solar power getting double the intensity of earth sunlight in space. Sun synchronous orbit keeps them in sunlight about 97-100% of the time. I was using nuclear reactor equivalents to show how much power this would be. 25 to 60 Starship launches would be 1 gigawatt of power. 25,000 launches could be one terawatt of power. This would be over 8400 Terawatt hours per year which is double the electrical power of the United States.