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.
Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen, because he got distracted or something? He doesn’t really have battery capacity worth writing home about, the Chinese are surpassing Tesla in EV manufacturing, and Waymo is far ahead in self-driving.
The amazing space computation cost reduction process sounds rather more challenging than the Model 2, and I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off.
Tesla invested into the first Lotus roadster - and put that cash into the S then the X. Used that cash to build the worlds largest factories and make the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes - so large in fact that the S & X are now tiny single percentages of sales which is why Tesla is stopping manufacturing them now.
Tesla is one of the very few vehicle manufactures which makes a profit manufacturing vehicles. Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning.
Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time. What the Chinese are doing in battery tech is irrelevant to US vehicles as they will never be allowed to sell in the US which is Teslas largest market.
The model 2 has the possibility of being profitable at insanely low purchase price which has the potential to completely disrupt the economics of US sales in such a way that legacy auto could well be bankrupt in 5-10 years. Who will be making Waymo's vehicles then?
Tesla isn't even in the top 15 auto manufacturers by volume? The largest manufacturer Toyota produces 9x the cars Tesla does. Tesla is also on a multiyear sales drop with no sign of sales improvement.
The top 15 car makers produced 70 million cars, to Tesla's 1.7m. They have no enormous volume, at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...
If Tesla's stock traded in line with its competitors, its a $30-40B company. The hype around future growth (now completely off the charts) is the only reason the stock price is out of line with reality. There is no reason to expect Tesla's sales figures to improve going forward, in fact, they will continue to decrease.
> Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning
Tesla had a profit of $3.8b in 2025 (this is a 46% drop from 2024 and a second year over year drop). It's revenue was $94b (also less than 2024), which places it 12th among auto manufacturers. It's profit is 6th, which is a decent margin compared to legacy makers, but as mentioned above, the profit is plummeting as Tesla struggles to sell cars. It's revenue among all global companies is not even in the top 100.
It does not "throw off cash", the business is in a tailspin.
>They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time
Musk has been promising full self driving mode is within six months to a year away. He first made those claims in the mid 2010s? Do Tesla's have full self driving mode in 2026?
There is a decade long trail of failed claims from Musk and Tesla.
In 2019, Musk predicted 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020. How many Tesla robotaxis are on the road in 2026? Fifty? One hundred? It's a rounding error compared to the claim that they'd have a million in 2020...
Musk said in 2019 that he believed Tesla vehicles were not traditional depreciating assets and instead could appreciate because they contained future-value technologies, especially Full Self-Driving (FSD): “I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset — not a depreciating asset.”
In fact, Tesla's are among the worst depreciating vehicles on the market today, their depreciation compares to the low end car market of Nissan, Hyundai and other low quality manfacturers.
Elon projected 250-500k Cybertruck sales per year. In reality, they sold 38k in 2024, and just 16k in 2025.
>They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time