Elon Musk: belief

Transcript context

…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. You find these infinitely elastic use cases of your next rocket, and your next rocket, and next scale up.…

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