Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedElon Musk: evaluation
5 Feb 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
“Which it is because you don’t have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Elon Musk
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 5 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…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?…
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