We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea.
Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
Main physics problem is actually that the math works better at higher GPU temps for efficiency reasons and that might have reliability trade off.
It's scifi nonsense for no purpose other than to sound cool.
Getting better at creating and erecting solar panels & AI datacenters on earth is all well and good, but it doesn't advance SpaceX or humanity very much. At lot of the bottlenecks there are around moving physical mass and paperwork.
Whereas combining SpaceX & xAI together means the margins for AI are used to force the economies of scale which drives the manufacturing efficiencies needed to drive down launch etc.
Which opens up new markets like Mars etc.
It is also pushing their competitive advantage. It leaves a massive moat which makes it very hard for competitors. If xAI ends up with a lower cost of capital (big if - like Amazon this might take 20 years horizon to realize) but it would give them a massive moat to be vertically integrated. OpenAI and others would be priced out.
If xAI wants to double AI capacity then it's a purely an automation of manufacturing problem which plays to Elons strengths (Tesla & automation). For anyone on earth doubling capacity means working with electricity restrictions, licensing, bureaucracy, etc. For example all turbines needed for electricity plants are sold years in advance. You can't get a new thermal plant built & online within 5 years even if you had infinite money as turbines are highly complex and just not available.
We can't build an independent colony we can't live there any time soon. Arguably it may never make sense to live there.
2. Farming didn't evolve from a vision of "let's stay in one place, so let's find a way to do it"; it evolved from the gradual application of accumulated practical knowledge under real constraints until eventually it was possible to stay in one place. If Paleoelon had somehow convinced early humanity to abandon hunter-gathering and settle into a sedentary life because he had a vision for new markets around farming it would have led to the earliest famine.
Switching to a farming lifestyle was certainly not done by choice, but to avoid death by starvation, as we now know that this has caused various health problems, especially in the beginning, presumably until experience has taught them to achieve a more balanced diet, by combining at least 3 kinds of plant seeds, 2 with complementary amino acid profile and 1 kind of oily seeds for essential fatty acids (the most ancient farming societies have combined barley or einkorn or emmer wheat with lentils or peas or a few other legumes less used today and with flax seeds).