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.
The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.
Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do.
Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post.
Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;)
What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
Driving down the cost makes massive overprovision a means of reducing the intermittency because you will be able to cover demand at proportionally far lower output, which also means you'll be able to cover demands in far larger areas, even before looking at storage.
But lower solar costs would also make storage more cost effective, since power cost will be a lower proportion of the amortised cost of the total system. Same with increasing transmission investments to allow smoothing load. Ever cost drop for solar will make it able to cover a larger proportion of total power demand, and we're nowhere near maximising viable total capacity even at current costs.
A whole lot of industrial costs are also affected by energy prices. Drive down this down, and you should expect price drops in other areas as well as industrial uses where energy expensive processes are not cost-effective today.
The geopolitical consequences of a dramatic acceleration of the drop in dependency on oil and gas would also take decades to play out.
At the same time, if you can drive down the cost of energy by making solar so much cheaper, you also make earth-bound data centres more cost-competive, and the cost-advantage of space-bound data centres would be accordingly lower.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore (but there's the whole issue of cooling being far harder in space), but I also think the effects would be far broader. By all means, if Musk wants to poor resources into making solar cheap enough for this kind of project to be viable, he should go ahead - maybe it'll consume enough of time to give him less time to plan a teenage edgelor - because I think the societal effects of driving down energy costs would generally be positive, AI or not, it just screams of being a justification for an xAI purchase done mostly for his personal financial engineering.