Are there really three hours of questions? Are you fucking serious? You don't think there's a lot to talk about, Elon? Holy fuck man. It's the most interesting point. All the storylines are converging right now. We'll see how much we can get through. It's almost like I planned it. Exactly. We'll get to that. But I would never do such a thing… As you know better than anybody else, only 10-15% of the total cost of ownership of a data center is energy. That's the part you're presumably saving by moving this into space. Most of it's the GPUs. If they're in space, it's harder to service them or you can't service them.
So the depreciation cycle goes down on them. It's just way more expensive to have the GPUs in space, presumably. What's the reason to put them in space? The availability of energy is the issue. If you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It’s maybe a slight increase, but pretty close flat. China has a rapid increase in electrical output. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity? Especially as you scale. The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat.
So how are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies? You're famously a big fan of solar. One terawatt of solar power, with a 25% capacity factor, that’s like four terawatts of solar panels. It's 1% of the land area of the United States. We’re in the singularity when we’ve got one terawatt of data centers, right? So what are you running out of exactly? How far into the singularity are you though? You tell me. Exactly. So I think we'll find we're in the singularity and it’ll be like, "Okay, we’ve still got a long way to go." But is the plan to put it in space after we've covered Nevada in solar panels? I think it's pretty hard to cover Nevada in solar panels. You have to get permits. Try getting the permits for that. See what happens. So space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space. You're also going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don't need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says, "it's always sunny in space". Which it is because you don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy. So any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night.
It's actually much cheaper to do in space. My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months. 36 months? Less than 36 months. How do you service GPUs as they fail, which happens quite often in training? Actually, it depends on how recent the GPUs are that have arrived. At this point, we find our GPUs to be quite reliable. There's infant mortality, which you can obviously iron out on the ground. So you can just run them on the ground and confirm that you don't have infant mortality with the GPUs. But once they start working and you're past the initial debug cycle of Nvidia or whoever's making the chips—could be Tesla AI6 chips or something like that, or it could be TPUs or Trainiums or whatever—they’re quite reliable past a certain point.
So I don't think the servicing thing is an issue. But you can mark my words. In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space. It will then get ridiculously better to be in space. The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space. You can't scale very much on Earth.
But by very much, to be clear, you're talking terawatts? Yeah. All of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt on average. So if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that's quite a lot. Can you imagine building that many data centers, that many power plants? Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware.
It's actually very difficult to build power plants. You don't just need power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment. You need the electrical transformers to run the AI transformers. Now, the utility industry is a very slow industry. They pretty much impedance match to the government, to the Public Utility Commissions. They impedance match literally and figuratively. They're very slow, because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is... Have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale, with a lot of power? As a professional podcaster, I can say that I have not, in fact. They need many more views before that becomes an issue. They have to do a study for a year. A year later, they'll come back to you with their interconnect study. Can't you solve this with your own behind the meter power stuff? You can build power plants. That's what we did at xAI, for Colossus 2. So why talk about the grid? Why not just build GPUs and power co-located? That's what we did. But I'm saying why isn't this a generalized solution?
Where do you get the power plants from? When you're talking about all the issues working with utilities, you can just build private power plants with the data centers. Right. But it begs the question of where do you get the power plants from? The power plant makers. Oh, I see what you're saying. Is this the gas turbine backlog basically? Yes. You can drill down to a level further. It's the vanes and blades in the turbines that are the limiting factor because it’s a very specialized process to cast the blades and vanes in the turbines, assuming you’re using gas power. It's very difficult to scale other forms of power. You can potentially scale solar, but the tariffs currently for importing solar in the US are gigantic and the domestic solar production is pitiful. Why not make solar? That seems like a good Elon-shaped problem. We are going to make solar. Okay. Both SpaceX and Tesla are building towards 100 gigawatts a year of solar cell production. How low down the stack? From polysilicon up to the wafer to the final panel? I think you've got to do the whole thing from raw materials to finish the cell.
Now, if it's going to space, it costs less and it's easier to make solar cells that go to space because they don't need much glass. They don't need heavy framing because they don't have to survive weather events. There's no weather in space. So it's actually a cheaper solar cell that goes to space than the one on the ground. Is there a path to getting them as cheap as you need in the next 36 months? Solar cells are already very cheap. They're farcically cheap. I think solar cells in China are around $0.25-30/watt or something like that. It's absurdly cheap. Now put it in space, and it's five times cheaper. In fact, it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close. It'll be an order of magnitude easier to scale. The point is you won't be able to scale on the ground. You just won't. People are going to hit the wall big time on power generation. They already are. The number of miracles in series that the xAI team had to accomplish in order to get a gigawatt of power online was crazy. We had to gang together a whole bunch of turbines. We then had permit issues in Tennessee and had to go across the border to Mississippi, which is fortunately only a few miles away. But we still then had to run the high power lines a few miles and build the power plant in Mississippi.
It was very difficult to build that. People don't understand how much electricity you actually need at the generation level in order to power a data center. Because the noobs will look at the power consumption of, say a GB300, and multiply that by a thing and then think that's the amount of power you need. All the cooling and everything. Wake up. That's a total noob, you’ve never done any hardware in your life before. Besides the GB300, you've got to power all of the networking hardware. There's a whole bunch of CPU and storage stuff that's happening. You've got to size for your peak cooling requirements. That means, can you cool even on the worst hour of the worst day of the year? It gets pretty frigging hot in Memphis. So you're going to have a 40% increase on your power just for cooling. That’s assuming you don't want your data center to turn off on hot days and you want to keep going. There's another multiplicative element on top of that which is, are you assuming that you never have any hiccups in your power generation? Actually, sometimes we have to take the generators, some of the power, offline in order to service it. Okay, now you add another 20-25% multiplier on that, because you've got to assume that you've got to take power offline to service it. So our actual estimate: every 110,000 GB300s—inclusive of networking, CPU, storage, cooling, margin for servicing power—is roughly 300 megawatts. Sorry, say that again.
What you probably need at the generation level to service 330,000 GB 300s—including all of the associated support networking and everything else, and the peak cooling, and to have some power margin reserve—is roughly a gigawatt. Can I ask a very naive question? You're describing the engineering details of doing this stuff on Earth. But then there's analogous engineering difficulties of doing it in space. How do you replace infinite bandwidth with orbital lasers, et cetera, et cetera?
How do you make it resistant to radiation? I don't know the details of the engineering, but fundamentally, what is the reason to think those challenges which have never had to be addressed before will end up being easier than just building more turbines on Earth? There are companies that build turbines on Earth. They can make more turbines, right? Again, try doing it and then you'll see. The turbines are sold out through 2030. Have you guys considered making your own? In order to bring enough power online, I think SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades, the vanes and blades, internally.
But just the blades or the turbines? The limiting factor... you can get everything except the blades. They call them blades and vanes. You can get that 12 to 18 months before the vanes and blades. The limiting factor is the vanes and blades. There are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they're massively backlogged. Is this Siemens, GE, those guys, or is it a sub company? No, it's other companies. Sometimes they have a little bit of casting capability in-house. But I'm just saying you can just call any of the turbine makers and they will tell you. It's not top secret. It’s probably on the internet right now. If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits, and everything. So if you try to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go, but you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with the batteries. Why would it not work to stand up your own solar production? You're right that you eventually run out of land, but there's a lot of land here in Texas. There's a lot of land in Nevada, including private land. It's not all publicly-owned land. So you'd be able to at least get the next Colossus and the next one after that. At a certain point, you hit a wall. But wouldn't that work for the moment?
As I said, we are scaling solar production. There's a rate at which you can scale physical production of solar cells. We're going as fast as possible in scaling domestic production. You're making the solar cells at Tesla? Both Tesla and SpaceX have a mandate to get to 100 gigawatts a year of solar. Speaking of the annual capacity, I'm curious, in five years time let's say, what will the installed capacity be on Earth…? Five years is a long time. And in space? I deliberately pick five years because it's after your "once we're up and running" threshold. So in five years time what's the on-Earth versus in-space installed AI capacity? If you say five years from now, I think probably AI in space will be launching every year the sum total of all AI on Earth. Meaning, five years from now, my prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth. Which is...
I would expect it to be at least, five years from now, a few hundred gigawatts per year of AI in space and rising. I think you can get to around a terawatt a year of AI in space before you start having fuel supply challenges for the rocket. Okay, but you think you can get hundreds of gigawatts per year in five years time? Yes. So 100 gigawatts, depending on the specific power of the whole system with solar arrays and radiators and everything, is on the order of 10,000 Starship launches. Yes.
You want to do that in one year. So that's like one Starship launch every hour. That's happening in this city? Walk me through a world where there's a Starship launch every single hour. I mean, that's actually a lower rate compared to airlines, aircraft. There's a lot of airports. A lot of airports. And you’ve got to launch into the polar orbit. No, it doesn't have to be polar. There's some value to sun-synchronous, but I think actually, if you just go high enough, you start getting out of Earth's shadow.
How many physical Starships are needed to do 10,000 launches a year? I don't think we'll need more than... You could probably do it with as few as 20 or 30. It really depends on how quickly… The ship has to go around the Earth and the ground track for the ship has to come back over the launch pad. So if you can use a ship every, say 30 hours, you could do it with 30 ships. But we'll make more ships than that. SpaceX is gearing up to do 10,000 launches a year, and maybe even 20 or 30,000 launches a year.
Is the idea to become basically a hyperscaler, become an Oracle, and lend this capacity to other people? Presumably, SpaceX is the one launching all this. So, SpaceX is going to become a hyperscaler? Hyper-hyper. If some of my predictions come true, SpaceX will launch more AI than the cumulative amount on Earth of everything else combined. Is this mostly inference or? Most AI will be inference. Already, inference for the purpose of training is most training. There's a narrative that the change in discussion around a SpaceX IPO is because previously SpaceX was very capital efficient.
It wasn't that expensive to develop. Even though it sounds expensive, it's actually very capital efficient in how it runs. Whereas now you're going to need more capital than just can be raised in the private markets. The private markets can accommodate raises of—as we've seen from the AI labs—tens of billions of dollars, but not beyond that. Is it that you'll just need more than tens of billions of dollars per year? That's why you'd take it public? I have to be careful about saying things about companies that might go public. That’s never been a problem for you, Elon.
There's a price to pay for these things. Make some general statements for us about the depth of the capital markets between public and private markets. There's a lot more capital available... Very general. There's obviously a lot more capital available in the public markets than private. It might be 100x more capital, but it's way more than 10x. Isn't it also the case that with things that tend to be very capital intensive—if you look at, say, real estate as a huge industry, that raises a lot of money each year at an industry level—they tend to be debt financed because by the time you're deploying that much money, you actually have a pretty— You have a clear revenue stream.
Exactly, and a near-term return. You see this even with the data center build-outs, which are famously being financed by the private credit industry. Why not just debt finance? Speed is important. I'm generally going to do the thing that... I just repeatedly tackle the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor, then I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else. Based on your statements about Tesla and being public, I wouldn't have guessed that you thought the way to move fast is to be public. Normally, I would say that's true. Like I said, I'd like to talk about it in some more detail, but the problem is if you talk about public companies before they become public, you get into trouble, and then you have to delay your offering. And as you said, you’re solving for speed. Yes, exactly. You can't hype companies that might go public. So that's why we have to be a little careful here.
But we can talk about physics. The way you think about scaling long-term is that Earth only receives about half a billionth of the Sun's energy. The Sun is essentially all the energy. This is a very important point to appreciate because sometimes people will talk about modular nuclear reactors or various fusion on Earth. But you have to step back a second and say, if you're going to climb the Kardashev scale and harness some nontrivial percentage of the sun's energy… Let's say you wanted to harness a millionth of the sun's energy, which sounds pretty small. That would be about, call it roughly, 100,000x more electricity than we currently generate on Earth for all of civilization. Give or take an order of magnitude. Obviously, the only way to scale is to go to space with solar. Launching from Earth, you can get to about a terawatt per year.
Beyond that, you want to launch from the moon. You want to have a mass driver on the moon. With that mass driver on the moon, you could do probably a petawatt per year. We're talking these kinds of numbers, terawatts of compute. Presumably, whether you're talking about land or space, far, far before this point, you run into... Maybe the solar panels are more efficient, but you still need the chips. You still need the logic and the memory and so forth. You're going to need to build a lot more chips and make them much cheaper. Right now the world has maybe 20-25 gigawatts of compute.
How are we getting a terawatt of logic by 2030? I guess we're going to need some very big chip fabs. Tell me about it. I've mentioned publicly the idea of doing a sort of a TeraFab, Tera being the new Giga. I feel like the naming scheme of Tesla, which has been very catchy, is you looking at the metric scale. At what level of the stack are you? Are you building the clean room and then partnering with an existing fab to get the process technology and buying the tools from them? What is the plan there?
Well, you can't partner with existing fabs because they can't output enough. The chip volume is too low. But for the process technology? Partner for the IP. The fabs today all basically use machines from like five companies. So you've got ASML, Tokyo Electron, KLA-Tencor, et cetera. So at first, I think you'd have to get equipment from them and then modify it or work with them to increase the volume.
But I think you'd have to build perhaps in a different way. The logical thing to do is to use conventional equipment in an unconventional way to get to scale, and then start modifying the equipment to increase the rate. Boring Company-style. Yeah. You sort of buy an existing boring machine and then figure out how to dig tunnels in the first place and then design a much better machine that's some orders of magnitude faster. Here's a very simple lens. We can categorize technologies and how hard they are. One categorization could be to look at things that China has not succeeded in doing. If you look at Chinese manufacturing, they’re still behind on leading-edge chips and still behind on leading-edge turbine engines and things like that. So does the fact that China has not successfully replicated TSMC give you any pause about the difficulty? Or do you think that's not true for some reason? It's not that they have not replicated TSMC, they have not replicated ASML. That's the limiting factor.
So you think it's just the sanctions, essentially? Yeah, China would be outputting vast numbers of chips if they could buy 2-3 nanometers. But couldn't they up to relatively recently buy them? No. Okay. The ASML ban has been in place for a while. But I think China's going to be making pretty compelling chips in three or four years. Would you consider making the ASML machines? "I don't know yet" is the right answer. To reach a large volume in, say, 36 months, to match the rocket payload to orbit… If we're doing a million tons to orbit in, let's say three or four years from now, something like that… We're doing 100 kilowatts per ton. So that means we need at least 100 gigawatts per year of solar. We'll need an equivalent amount of chips. You need 100 gigawatts worth of chips. You've got to match these things: the mass to orbit, the power generation, and the chips. I'd say my biggest concern actually is memory.
The path to creating logic chips is more obvious than the path to having sufficient memory to support logic chips. That's why you see DDR prices going ballistic and these memes. You're marooned on a desert island. You write "Help me" on the sand. Nobody comes. You write "DDR RAM." Ships come swarming in. I'd love to hear your manufacturing philosophy around fabs.
I know nothing about the topic. I don't know how to build a fab yet. I'll figure it out. Obviously, I've never built a fab. It sounds like you think the process knowledge of these 10,000 PhDs in Taiwan who know exactly what gas goes in the plasma chamber and what settings to put on the tool, you can just delete those steps. Fundamentally, it's about getting the clean room, getting the tools, and figuring it out. I don't think it's PhDs. It's mostly people who are not PhDs. Most engineering is done by people who don't have PhDs. Do you guys have PhDs? No. Okay.
We also haven't successfully built any fabs, so you shouldn't be coming to us for fab advice. I don't think you need PhDs for that stuff. But you do need competent personnel. Right now, Tesla is pedal to the metal, max production of going as fast as possible to get Tesla AI5 chip design into production and then reaching scale. That'll probably happen around the second quarter-ish of next year, hopefully.
AI6 would hopefully follow less than a year later. We've secured all the chip fab production that we can. Yes. But you're currently limited on TSMC fab capacity. Yeah. We'll be using TSMC Taiwan, Samsung Korea, TSMC Arizona, Samsung Texas. And we still— You've booked out all the capacity. Yes. I ask TSMC or Samsung, "okay, what's the timeframe to get to volume production?" The point is, you've got to build the fab and you've got to start production, then you've got to climb the yield curve and reach volume production at high yield.
That, from start to finish, is a five-year period. So the limiting factor is chips. The limiting factor once you can get to space is chips, but the limiting factor before you can get to space is power. Why don't you do the Jensen thing and just prepay TSMC to build more fabs for you? I've already told them that. But they won't take your money? What's going on? They're building fabs as fast as they can. So is Samsung. They're pedal to the metal. They're going balls to the wall, as fast as they can. It’s still not fast enough. Like I said, I think towards the end of this year, chip production will probably outpace the ability to turn chips on. But once you can get to space and unlock the power constraint, you can now do hundreds of gigawatts per year of power in space. Again, bearing in mind that average power usage in the US is 500 gigawatts. So if you're launching, say 200 gigawatts, a year to space, you're sort of lapping the US every two and a half years.
All US electricity production, this is a very huge amount. Between now and then, the constraint for server-side compute, concentrated compute, will be electricity. My guess is that people start getting to the point where they can't turn the chips on for large clusters towards the end of this year. The chips are going to be piling up and won't be able to be turned on. Now for edge compute it’s a different story. For Tesla, the AI5 chip is going into our Optimus robot. If you have AI edge compute, that's distributed power. Now the power is distributed over a large area. It's not concentrated. If you can charge at night, you can actually use the grid much more effectively. Because the actual peak power production in the US is over 1,000 gigawatts. But the average power usage, because the day-night cycle, is 500. So if you can charge at night, there's an incremental 500 gigawatts that you can generate at night.
So that's why Tesla, for edge compute, is not constrained. We can make a lot of chips to make a very large number of robots and cars. But if you try to concentrate that compute, you're going to have a lot of trouble turning it on. What I find remarkable about the SpaceX business is the end goal is to get to Mars, but you keep finding ways on the way there to keep generating incremental revenue to get to the next stage and the next stage. So for Falcon 9, it's Starlink. Now for Starship, it is potentially going to be orbital data centers.
Like, you find these infinitely elastic, marginal use cases of your next rocket, and your next rocket, and next scale up. You can see how this might seem like a simulation to me. Or am I someone's avatar in a video game or something? Because what are the odds that all these crazy things should be happening? I mean, rockets and chips and robots and space solar power, not to mention the mass driver on the moon. I really want to see that. Can you imagine some mass driver that's just going like shoom shoom? It's sending solar-powered AI satellites into space one after another at two and a half kilometers per second, just shooting them into deep space. That would be a sight to see. I mean, I'd watch that. Just like a live stream of it on a webcam? Yeah, yeah, just one after another, just shooting AI satellites into deep space, a billion or 10 billion tons a year. I'm sorry, you manufacture the satellites on the moon? Yeah. I see. So you send the raw materials to the moon and then manufacture them there. Well, the lunar soil is 20% silicon or something like that. So you can mine the silicon on the moon, refine it, and create the solar cells and the radiators on the moon. You make the radiators out of aluminum. So there's plenty of silicon and aluminum on the moon to make the cells and the radiators. The chips you could send from Earth because they're pretty light.
Maybe at some point you make them on the moon, too. Like I said, it does seem like a sort of a video game situation where it's difficult but not impossible to get to the next level. I don't see any way that you could do 500-1,000 terawatts per year launched from Earth. I agree. But you could do that from the Moon. Can I zoom out and ask about the SpaceX mission?
I think you've said that we've got to get to Mars so we can make sure that if something happens to Earth, civilization, consciousness, and all that survives. Yes. By the time you're sending stuff to Mars, Grok is on that ship with you, right? So if Grok's gone Terminator… The main risk you're worried about is AI, why doesn't that follow you to Mars? I'm not sure AI is the main risk I'm worried about. The important thing is consciousness. I think arguably most consciousness, or most intelligence—certainly consciousness is more of a debatable thing… The vast majority of intelligence in the future will be AI.
AI will exceed… How many petawatts of intelligence will be silicon versus biological? Basically humans will be a very tiny percentage of all intelligence in the future if current trends continue. As long as I think there's intelligence—ideally also which includes human intelligence and consciousness propagated into the future—that's a good thing. So you want to take the set of actions that maximize the probable light cone of consciousness and intelligence. Just to be clear, the mission of SpaceX is that even if something happens to the humans, the AIs will be on Mars, and the AI intelligence will continue the light of our journey. Yeah. To be fair, I'm very pro-human. I want to make sure we take certain actions that ensure that humans are along for the ride. We're at least there. But I'm just saying the total amount of intelligence… I think maybe in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence.
If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence. What should our goal be for such a civilization? Is the idea that a small minority of humans still have control of the AIs? Is the idea of some sort of just trade but no control? How should we think about the relationship between the vast stocks of AI population versus human population? In the long run, I think it's difficult to imagine that if humans have, say 1%, of the combined intelligence of artificial intelligence, that humans will be in charge of AI. I think what we can do is make sure that AI has values that cause intelligence to be propagated into the universe.
xAI's mission is to understand the universe. Now that's actually very important. What things are necessary to understand the universe? You have to be curious and you have to exist. You can't understand the universe if you don't exist. So you actually want to increase the amount of intelligence in the universe, increase the probable lifespan of intelligence, the scope and scale of intelligence. I think as a corollary, you have humanity also continuing to expand because if you're curious about trying to understand the universe, one thing you try to understand is where will humanity go?
I think understanding the universe means you would care about propagating humanity into the future. That's why I think our mission statement is profoundly important. To the degree that Grok adheres to that mission statement, I think the future will be very good. I want to ask about how to make Grok adhere to that mission statement. But first I want to understand the mission statement. So there's understanding the universe. They're spreading intelligence. And they're spreading humans.
All three seem like distinct vectors. I'll tell you why I think that understanding the universe encompasses all of those things. You can't have understanding without intelligence and, I think, without consciousness. So in order to understand the universe, you have to expand the scale and probably the scope of intelligence, because there are different types of intelligence. I guess from a human-centric perspective, put humans in comparison to chimpanzees. Humans are trying to understand the universe. They're not expanding chimpanzee footprint or something, right?
