Total investment in xAI are around $30B-40B (including the latest E round). Twitter purchase price at $44B was more than that. Out of that 44B, ~$25B was debt financing.
> Star Link is one of those mad plans that actually seems to make sense now [...] AI data centers in space are similarly ludicrous unless you have a newly developed 100+ ton to orbit reusable launch capability at your disposal
I don't think these two are comparable. Starlink obviously makes sense if you can put thousands of satellites in LEO cheaply, which (only) SpaceX could. The challenge there was to actually build and put them there.
For data centers, even if you can launch for free, the physics and economics don't make sense. Solar is free but the amount of solar arrays (and cooling radiators) required means it's just easier and cheaper to build out the same thing on Earth, and that's without thinking about maintenance of either the data center or the required support equipment.
In theory it can be done. In practice, I humbly propose that putting the same engineering brains on solving the hard questions of keeping people alive in space (so they can, eg, get to Mars and back) would align more closely with the SpaceX mission.
> But what's the alternative if you are semi serious about controlling an armada of space craft across the solar system?
"X Combinator" for space tech (life support, stations, habitats, etc - everything that SpaceX itself isn't focusing on). Refueling depots at strategic locations that are good launching points for deep space (Mars+) missions.
Not a friggin' LLM.
The point of Star link was orders of magnitude reduction in cost of launching thousands of satellites. Musk is talking indirectly about another order magnitude of further reduction of that via star ship; sorry if that wasn't clear.
> the physics and economics don't make sense
This is a popular assertion that despite all the experts chiming in is not that black and white. Clearly investors and Elon Musk beg to differ. Similar arguments were used against Star Link when that was still science fiction. And now it isn't. It actually seems like a good idea that at this point is being copied by others. And SpaceX is getting a lot of the launching business, for now.
I think it's mainly the economics that are the challenge here; not the physics. Implicit in the assertion is that launching the amount of mass needed would be prohibitively expensive. There are lots of engineering challenges as well.
> it's just easier and cheaper to build out the same thing on Earth
Maybe; but it seems challenging to scale there. Permitting and scaling energy generation are a problem right now. But I agree, it's more logical to fix that. But one does not exclude the other. We might end up with a lot of in orbit computation regardless. It's not an either or proposition.
Of course it's the economics, not the physics, that are the challenge. We have thousands of existence proofs that you can launch a computer into orbit and have it work. The question is not, can you do it. The question is, why would you do it instead of putting that same computing capacity in a building somewhere?
It's not an either/or proposition in general but it is at the small scale. If I'm going to spend a million dollars on computing equipment, I can spend it on a terrestrial installation, or a space installation, or put some if it towards each, but anything I put towards one takes away from the other. If the economics of a terrestrial installation are much better than a space installation, why would I allocate any of my money to space?
Most of the conversation here seems to boil down to:
"Putting a data center in space is very hard and makes no sense."
"Putting a data center in space is actually pretty easy."
But by "hard" we mean "difficult to the point of being extremely economically uncompetitive with putting computers in a building," and by "easy" they mean "technologically feasible and the basic concept of computers in space has been done many times already."