Elon Musk: evaluation

Transcript context

…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.…

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