Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedElon Musk: belief
5 Feb 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
“I think you pretty much do it the same way that you do things on Earth, apart from making it run hotter.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Elon Musk
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 5 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…How do you design a chip for space? What changes? You want to design it to be more radiation tolerant and run at a higher temperature. Roughly, if you increase the operating temperature by 20% in degrees Kelvin, you can cut your radiator mass in half. So running at a higher temperature is helpful in space. There are various things you can do for shielding the memory. But neural nets are going to be very resilient to bit flips. Most of what happens for radiation is random bit flips. But if you’ve got a multi-trillion parameter model and you get a few bit flips, it doesn’t matter. Heuristic programs are going to be much more sensitive to bit flips than some giant parameter file. I just design it to run hot. I think you pretty much do it the same way that you do things on Earth, apart from making it run hotter. The solar array is most of the weight on the satellite. Is there a way to make the GPUs even more powerful than what Nvidia and TPUs and et cetera are planning on doing that would be especially privileged in the space-based world?…
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